Frequently Asked Questions

A discovery site for shopping. You search or browse products — grocery, home, personal care, apparel and more — and every product carries a rating of the company behind it on two things: its impact on the planet, and how it treats people.

Leif List was founded by Logan Fisher. The About page has the story behind it.

Brands land on one ladder: Below Average, Average, Good, Great, Excellent. Great and Excellent can’t be reached on published paperwork alone — they need real, independently verified certifications, so a large company can’t out-rank a genuine mission brand just by producing more reports.

Ratings shown as “Likely” are built from the public record rather than verified data, and they’re labelled that way so the two are never confused. How Scoring Works covers it in full, including where the method falls short.

Because the evidence won’t support a call — there’s too little public information, what exists is too contradictory to resolve, the company actually responsible for the product can’t be confidently identified, or we simply haven’t got to it yet.

Unrated is an admission about our information, not a finding about the company. It doesn’t mean the brand is bad.

Because AI lets us cover ground that used to need a research team. Reading a brand’s reporting, its filings, its certifications and the coverage of what it has actually been caught doing — across thousands of brands — was a staffed job until recently. It isn’t now. A registry only tells you what a brand was certified for; it can’t tell you about a labor controversy or a walked-back climate pledge. AI reads the public record and turns it into plain language at scale.

AI can also state something false in a confident voice, so the work is built around that:

Certifications are verified against public registries. When a brand is credited with B Corp, USDA Organic, EPA Safer Choice or ENERGY STAR, the claim is checked against the issuing body’s own records. A claim that doesn’t check out doesn’t count toward anything.

Unrated instead of a guess. When the evidence is too thin to support a judgment, the brand stays Unrated. An empty answer is more useful than a confident wrong one.

Estimates are labelled as estimates. A rating built from public evidence rather than verified data is shown as “Likely,” never as a hard verified number. The two are never blended.

None of this makes a rating infallible. It makes it checkable. Every rating shows the sources it was built from, so you can click through and judge for yourself.

No. Brands can’t pay for a rating, can’t pay to improve one, and can’t pay to have one removed. Affiliate partnership changes exactly one thing: where a buy link points. It doesn’t change the score, the tier, or the order products appear in.

Certification registries we can check directly — B Corp, USDA Organic, EPA Safer Choice, ENERGY STAR and others — plus the public record on each brand’s practices, controversies and commitments: sustainability reporting, regulatory filings and news coverage. Every rating shows the sources it was built from. See Methodology for the detail.

Yes, with no subscription and nothing gated. We earn in two ways:

Amazon Associates. Buy through an Amazon link on this site and we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you.

Partner affiliate networks. Some brands are affiliate partners, so a few products link to the brand’s own store instead of Amazon. Same arrangement: a small commission, no extra cost to you.

That can’t influence a rating, and here’s why. A rating is produced from the brand’s own record — certifications checked against public registries, plus the public evidence on its practices — and nothing in that process takes an input for whether a brand pays us. Being an affiliate partner changes exactly one thing: where the buy link points. It doesn’t change the score, the tier, or the order products appear in. That order comes from the rating and the values you choose to prioritize.

Prices refresh daily. Ratings update as new reporting, certifications and registry records become available, and when a certification is found to have lapsed the badge comes down rather than sitting there out of date. There’s no fixed schedule — a rating changes when the evidence does.

We don’t have every brand yet. Coverage is thinner than we’d like and it keeps growing. To ask for one to be added, or to flag a rating that looks wrong, use Report feedback — it comes straight to us and we read all of it.