Brands over time

The story

Brands over time measures how UK brands write, and how that has moved. Each brand's own blog posts, press releases and announcements are counted sentence by sentence, some of them back to 2015 through the Internet Archive, alongside one archived homepage a year.

At the time of writing it covers 140 brands across 12 sectors, from banks and energy suppliers to software, charities, supermarkets, fashion and travel. The brand list grows most weeks, so the homepage holds the current numbers.

Who it is for. Anyone curious whether company writing has really changed since ChatGPT arrived on 30 November 2022. That includes people who work at one of these brands, people who follow one, and anyone who suspects the companies they deal with sound different now. It is free to read and needs no account.

How it works in practice. Pick a brand from the A to Z list or browse by sector. Each brand page shows its writing measures by year, before and after ChatGPT, against its sector, the words it uses more than its peers, verbatim quotes linked to their sources, and its homepage over time. Every number carries its page count, so you can see how much is behind it.

What makes it different. Every measure is a plain code count from ScriptGrain's writing instruments: sentence length, contractions, pronouns, punctuation, long words and published lists of AI-associated words. No AI model reads or judges any page. Years with fewer than 10 pages, and before and after comparisons with fewer than 10 pages on a side, are labelled as context, not findings. The deepest records, 44 brands with at least 10 dated pages both before ChatGPT and from 2024 on, are given their own section on the homepage.

Where it stands now. Live, with brand pages, sector pages, a blog, a rights page explaining who owns the screenshots and quotations and how to ask for removal, and a privacy page. There is an llms.txt file for AI assistants.

What it deliberately does not do. It never says or implies that a brand used AI to write anything. The measures describe style only, and they cannot show who or what wrote a page. It does not treat thin data as a finding, and it does not hide where the evidence runs out.

What it does

• Over 100 UK brands across 12 sectors
• Writing measured sentence by sentence, some back to 2015
• Before and after ChatGPT, against each sector
• Verbatim quotes linked to their sources
• Every number carries its page count
• Free, no account, no AI judging the pages

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