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Methodology v4.1

How the Index is calculated

The rules, scoring, correction policy and limits of the live ranking.

1. What the Index measures

The Index ranks published sustainability reports on how well they communicate, not on how sustainable the company is.

Corporate sustainability information is read by people and automated systems. BIS Project Gaia demonstrates extraction of climate indicators from reports using language models; Morningstar Sustainalytics describes using machine learning and language models in its assessment process. These examples support assessing whether report text can be extracted and understood. They do not establish that every report is read by AI before a person, or that improving an Index score changes an agency rating.

The Index does not measure emissions, targets, controversies or performance. Companies with similar sustainability programmes can receive different communication scores because their reports explain the work differently.

2. The universe

A ranking is only defensible if the set of companies is defensible. The universe is defined by rules, published with the ranking, and applied without exception.

Rules:

  1. All stored reports across all countries and years are included, subject to the client, confidentiality and documented source exclusions below. Multiple reports from the same company are included. There is no listing, report-age or market-value cutoff.
  2. Every company's sector and industry come from the standard list of 11 sectors and 158 industries. There is no Private sector: a company without a recorded exchange ranks inside its own sector. A company whose stored sector and industry are not a pair from the standard list stays visible without a rank, showing Sector not classified.
  3. The year a report ranks under is the financial year the report covers, and it must be stored on the record. The Index reads no year out of a title or a file name. A report with no stored year stays visible without a rank, showing Report year unknown.
  4. Ranking requires an existing assessment, at least 20,000 extractable characters, all four gateway measurements, people readability and an industry benchmark. Reports missing one of these stay visible without a rank and with a reason.
  5. Clients are excluded: a company recorded as a client, with a client subscription, or with a report privately uploaded by an outside person is omitted entirely. Reports gathered by our own team remain eligible.
  6. The 51 documented source exclusions from 10 September 2026 remain excluded by company and report identity. The original evidence is retained; another report from the same company can qualify.
  7. Missing public identifiers or source links do not hide reports. A preliminary-analysis link requires an assessable report with a unique, nonempty identifier. Ambiguous duplicate identifiers are excluded.

Filters: year, sector, industry and company/report search. The initial view includes all years. Filters narrow the display; percentiles and ranks remain calculated within the full eligible sector across all years.

3. What is scored: the four gateways

Every report passes through four gateways in sequence. Each gateway is scored on the text the previous gateway passed through, so a weak result at an early gateway lowers the reliability of everything after it. The gateways are the same ones the platform applies to every client report and every prospect preliminary analysis, unchanged.

Gate 1: Accessibility

The share of the document that can be extracted as clean text. Password-protected files, scrambled fonts, text rendered as images and broken encodings all lower it. Reported as a percentage. Below 90%, the later gateways are marked as computed on a partial document.

Gate 2: Readability

How easily the extracted text is understood, by people and by machines, measured with the Readability Aggregate Index (RAI): a consensus of nine established readability formulas (Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning FOG, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, ARI, Linsear Write, Dale-Chall, and a consensus grade), normalised to a 0 to 100 scale. Two figures are reported: - Raw: the formulas' own verdict on the text. - Real: Raw multiplied by prose quality, the share of the document that is structurally a sentence with a subject and a finite verb. Tables, headings and fragments pull Real down. A wide gap between Raw and Real is itself a finding: most of what is being counted as text is not prose.

Each figure is computed twice: on the full extracted text (readability to people) and on an extractive summary of it (readability to AI). The Index counts both RAI Real figures equally: readability to people, and readability to AI as a proxy for readability of an automated extract. It does not reproduce a rating agency’s reading process.

Gate 3: Sustainability focus

The share of the document's extracted keywords that are sustainability keywords, matched against a taxonomy of environmental, social and governance terms organised by reporting framework (GRI, CSRD, ESRS, ISSB, TCFD, CDP, SASB). Reported as a percentage. For integrated and annual reports this is expected to be lower and is flagged as such.

Gate 4: Alignment

How closely the themes the report emphasises match what the market weights in the company's industry. The benchmark is the market-consensus weighting of environmental, social and governance themes for that industry, built from rating-agency methodologies and framework requirements.

Both sets of theme weights, the report's and the benchmark's, are rescaled to add up to 100%. Alignment is the share of the report's sustainability emphasis that is already where its industry puts it: 100% minus the share that would have to move to match the benchmark. As a formula, 1 - 0.5 x sum(|report share - benchmark share|) over every theme in either set. Over-weighting a theme counts against alignment as much as under-weighting one, because emphasis spent on one theme is emphasis missing from another.

Two examples. A report that leaves out a theme its industry weights at 30%, and spends that 30% on other themes, scores 70%. A report that puts 8% on a theme weighted at 2%, taking the extra 6 points from elsewhere, scores 94%. A report with no sustainability themes at all scores 0%.

Bands: good at 80% and above, fair from 50% to below 80%, poor below 50%.

4. How a rank is computed

  1. Each of the four gateway scores is placed in the distribution of the company's own sector: the share of reports in that sector scoring at or below it. That is the company's percentile on that gateway. Percentiles are recalculated every night against the universe as defined, so the same calculation that ranks a company can be re-run by anyone with the corpus.
  2. The Index score is the mean of the four gateway percentiles. Gate 2's percentile is the mean of its two readability percentiles, to people and to AI, so each gateway counts equally. One rule applies: a report whose accessibility is below 90% has every other percentile capped at the accessibility percentile. A document that cannot be read cannot rank above the reading of it.
  3. Companies are ranked on the Index score within their sector, highest first. Ties are broken by the alignment percentile, then by RAI Real to AI, then by company name, so the order is the same every time the query runs.

Small comparison groups. The table states the number of ranked reports in each sector. A sector with one company gives it rank 1 and 100th percentiles; that is not evidence that it outperformed another report. Small groups support limited conclusions. Search, sector and industry filters only narrow the display; they never recalculate the sector ranks on the current page or percentiles.

Why the sector and not the whole universe. A chemicals report and a bank's report are written for different readers under different rules. Ranking them against each other would measure the sector, not the company. The question a company asks is where it sits among its peers, so the peer set is the sector.

Why an average of percentiles and not a weighted composite. Weights are arguments. A percentile average says only that each gateway counts equally and that every company is judged against the same set. That is the claim we can defend.

Why percentiles and not raw scores. Raw scores have different scales and different distributions (accessibility clusters near 98%; RAI spreads across the range). Percentiles put them on one footing and answer the question a company asks: where do I sit among my peers.

5. What is published

The table shows every included report, 50 per page: company and report, sector, year, accessibility, readability to AI and people, emphasis, alignment, Index score and within-sector rank. Reports appear in sector-rank order. Each page loads when requested; search and filters cover all matching reports. The year shown is the financial year the report covers. Reports without a rank show the reason instead: Sector not classified while the company's sector and industry are not a pair from the standard list, Report year unknown while the report has no stored year, then Assessment unavailable, Below 20,000 extractable characters, Industry benchmark unavailable or One or more gateway scores unavailable.

The chart places emphasis (%) on the horizontal axis and (People RAI Real + AI RAI Real) / 2 on the vertical axis. Both axes are fixed from 0 to 100. Every visible point has the same radius, decreasing from 5 to 2 pixels as the visible sample grows. Size represents no company metric. Hover to see the company and report name immediately while its measurements load below; click or tap to keep them open. Arrow keys browse reports, and repeated clicks cycle nearby overlapping points. The chart includes every matching report with both chart measurements, regardless of the current table page. Reports missing either chart measurement remain available in the table.

The two sets of chart guides. The guides are reading aids drawn over the same points; neither changes a score, a percentile or a rank.

  • Quality bands is the default. It marks each axis with the published bands for that measure on its own: emphasis is poor below 30%, fair from 30% to below 50%, and good at 50% and above; readability is poor below 20, fair from 20 to 40, and good above 40. The bands describe the measure, not the company's place among its peers, so a report can sit in a good band and still rank low in a strong sector.
  • Percentiles of what is shown replaces those fixed bands with the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile of the reports currently drawn, one set per axis. It answers a different question: where this report sits among the ones on screen. Because it follows the filters, it moves when the filters move, and it is calculated from every drawn report rather than the fifty in the table page. It is not the within-sector percentile the Index score uses, which is calculated over a company's whole sector in section 4.

Switching between the two redraws the points already loaded and reads nothing further.

The page reports total reports, ranked reports, companies and report years. Rankings are recalculated every night from current stored reports, and the page shows when they were last updated. Positions can change overnight when new reports join a sector or a correction is made.

The full methodology, this document, is published with the ranking.

What is not published: any per-section diagnostic of a company's report, and any rewrite. Those are what the platform provides to a client. The public Index shows the position; the platform shows how to move it.

What a visitor can open. The rules, the scores and the ranks are the same for everyone. What differs is how much of the Index a visitor can open.

  • Without a link or an account, the Index page shows a summary of each sector, with no company names or scores, and a way to sign in.
  • A link to a report, such as one in an email from us, opens that report's sector with the report highlighted: the chart and the first 50 rows of the table. No account is needed.
  • An emailed link for a report that is not ranked yet names the company and the report, says why the report is not ranked, and opens the company's sector on the same terms. If we do not know the company's sector, the page shows the company and the report only.
  • A free account, signed in with a Microsoft or Google work account and linked once to the visitor's own company, opens that company's sector: the chart and the first 50 rows.
  • Plus opens every page of the subscriber's own sector. Max opens every sector and industry. Both can place any of their own reports on the chart, visible only to them, to see where it would rank.

In every case, hovering over a report on the chart shows its scores, and filters and search stay inside what is open. The link to a report's preliminary assessment appears only on the visitor's own report: the report their link opened, or their own company's reports once they sign in. Nobody, including subscribers, can open another company's preliminary assessment from the Index.

6. What the Index does not claim

  • It does not rate sustainability performance, and no line of the published ranking says or implies that a higher-ranked company is more sustainable.
  • It does not use any information a company has not published.
  • It does not apply a pass mark. The standard is the distribution of the universe, and a company at the median is at the median.
  • It is not a rating-agency score and does not predict one. It measures the property those scores depend on: whether the document can be read.

7. Corrections

We publish everything the corpus lets us read, and we fix what is wrong when someone tells us. A single indefensible ranking destroys the asset, so the correction route is public, short and answered.

  • How to ask. The "tell us if something is wrong" form at the foot of the Index page. Name the company, say what is wrong, and add the report identifier if you have it. You get a reference straight away. Nothing else is required, and you do not need an account.
  • Adding a missing report. Choose "Add my report" on the same form and send the company, your email and the link to the report. Only clients upload reports to the platform; for everyone else, we check that the report is the company's own and published on its own website, add it, and email you when it is live.
  • What we check. The claim is run against the methodology on this page: the right company, the right document, the right year, and the four gateway scores of that document. We answer within five working days.
  • How a correction appears. We correct the underlying report record. The updated ranking appears by the next day, when rankings are recalculated overnight, including any changes to other companies’ relative positions. If you provide an email address, we can reply about your request.

8. Versioning and refresh

  • The methodology carries a version number. Changes to the scoring or eligibility rules are recorded here.
  • Version 4.1, 23 September 2026. Section 5 sets out what each visitor can open: sector summaries without an account, the first 50 rows from a report link, an emailed link or a free work account, every page of the subscriber's own sector on Plus and every sector on Max. The preliminary assessment link appears only on the visitor's own report. Section 7 adds requests to add a missing report. Scoring and eligibility are unchanged.
  • Version 4.0, 22 September 2026. Gate 4 alignment is now the share of a report's sustainability emphasis that is where its industry puts it, replacing the single largest gap between one theme and its benchmark. The old measure gave a report that left out a theme weighted at 30% up to 50%, but gave one that wrote 8% on a theme weighted at 2% only 25%. The Index score now counts readability to people alongside readability to AI in Gate 2. Ranks change for most reports.
  • Version 3.3, 20 September 2026. Sectors and industries come from the standard list of 11 sectors and 158 industries: the Private sector is gone, a company without a recorded exchange ranks inside its own sector, and a company whose stored pair is not on the standard list shows Sector not classified instead of a rank. The report year is the financial year the report covers and must be stored on the record; titles and file names no longer supply a year, and a report with no stored year shows Report year unknown. Scoring is unchanged.
  • Version 3.2, 17 September 2026. Rankings are recalculated every night instead of on each page request, and the page shows when they were last updated. Corrections and new reports appear by the next day. Scoring and eligibility rules are unchanged.
  • Version 3.1, 12 September 2026. The €1 billion market-capitalisation cutoff is removed. Rankings are calculated from current stored reports when the page is requested. Report additions, corrected data and changes in eligibility can change a company’s score or rank. There is no annual publication cycle or dated-edition history.
  • Filters narrow the companies shown on the page; they do not recalculate its sector ranks.
  • Annual snapshots are not currently provided.

9. Sources