1. What the Website Index measures
The Website Index ranks companies' sustainability web pages on how well they communicate, not on how sustainable the company is. It uses the four gateways, the percentiles and the ranking rules of the Sustainability Reporting Index, applied to the text of one web page instead of a published report. The Website Index does not measure emissions, targets, controversies or performance.
2. What is scored
- One page per company. The page is the company's main sustainability page, found by web search. Other pages it links to are not included.
- The text on the page. We read paragraphs, headings and list items. We leave out menus, the site header and footer, page banners and tables, and we do not run the page's scripts. Text that only appears once a script runs is not scored.
- The latest capture. Each company ranks on the newest page we have scored. The table shows the date we scored it and links to the page, so anyone can compare the score with the text. Pages change: the live page may differ from the one we scored.
3. The gateways and the rank
The four gateways are the Reporting Index's, unchanged.
- Gate 1: Accessibility is the share of the page's text that survives cleaning. Below 90%, every other percentile is capped at the accessibility percentile.
- Gate 2: Readability counts readability to people and readability to AI equally.
- Gate 3: Sustainability focus is the share of the page's key terms that relate to sustainability.
- Gate 4: Alignment is the share of the page's sustainability emphasis that sits where its industry puts it.
Each score is placed within the company's sector, the Index score is the mean of the four gateway percentiles, and websites are ranked within their sector with the same tie-breaks. Websites are compared only with other websites, never with reports.
4. Which companies are included
- A company appears when we hold a scored sustainability page for it. There is no listing, size or market-value cutoff.
- Clients are excluded by the same rule as the Reporting Index.
- A page ranks when it has at least 2,000 extractable characters (a report needs 20,000, because a web page is shorter). Companies that do not rank stay visible with the reason: Sector not classified, Assessment unavailable, Page text too short or Industry benchmark unavailable.
5. What a visitor can open
The same rules as the Reporting Index. Without a link or an account, the page shows how many websites rank in each sector, with no company names or scores, and each sector has a public page describing its websites as a whole, in the Reporting Index's quality bands. A link from us or a free work account opens one sector: the chart and the first 50 rows. Plus opens every page of the subscriber's own sector, and Max opens every sector.
6. Limitations
- One page is a sample of how a company communicates online. A company that spreads its sustainability content across many pages may score lower than its site as a whole deserves.
- Pages built mostly with scripts, images or tables can show little readable text and rank lower or not at all.
- Search can find the wrong page. If we scored the wrong page, tell us and we will correct it.
- Small sectors support limited conclusions: a sector with one ranked website gives it rank 1.
7. Refresh and corrections
Rankings are recalculated every night from the pages we hold, and the page shows when they were last updated. To correct a page or company, use the form on the Sustainability Reporting Index page and say it is about the Website Index.