How we rate

A rating, or an honest "not yet"

When we've assessed a brand, you get a plain-language rating. When we haven't, you get told so. You never get a number.

Behind every brand is a question: how much do we actually know? That answer gets stated instead of blurred into one confident-looking figure. This site used to publish a number built from corporate disclosure paperwork; it read like a verdict it couldn't support, and it rewarded big companies for filing reports rather than for doing better. It's gone.

What the labels mean

Every brand lands on one simple ladder, from Very Bad up to Excellent.

Why a paperwork-only brand tops out at "Good"

A giant company can publish mountains of paperwork. That shouldn't let it out-rank a genuine mission brand — so a paperwork-only rating stops at "Good."

Large corporations have whole teams devoted to disclosure. If paperwork alone could carry a brand up the ladder, the top would fill up with the biggest companies simply because they produce the most reports — not because they're doing the most good.

So we draw a line. "Great" and "Excellent" can't be reached with paperwork alone. They're reserved for mission-driven brands that back up their commitments with real, independent certifications — the kind that require outside verification, not a press release.

How the assessment is built

One rating is really a summary of dozens of specific checks, grouped into three big areas.

Nothing here is rated on a vibe. Hundreds of individual data points are grouped into sub-categories, which combine into three pillars, which combine into the single overall assessment behind a brand's rating.

How estimated ratings are built

For brands without verified data, a fixed set of focused questions is answered using publicly available information — sustainability reports, certifications, news, and filings — and those answers roll up through the exact same three-pillar structure. A research agent does the reading, working only from the brand's own public pages, certifier directories, and credible reporting — and every answer it returns has to carry a direct quote and a link, or it is dropped before it reaches the page. The agent never sets the rating itself: the rules that turn those answers into a rating are fixed, and identical for every brand. The result is always shown as a "Likely" estimate, never as a verified result, so the two are never confused. The full sourcing rules are on Methodology.

What moves a rating up or down

Real-world actions adjust the rating — certifications lift it, controversies pull it down.

The baseline comes from the data above, then two things nudge it to reflect what a company actually does. They are also the two things we check by hand: a certification only counts once it's confirmed in the certifier's own registry or records, and a controversy only moves a rating once a person has read the source it came from — see Methodology for how that review works.

• Certifications lift a rating. Independent certifications are worth more than promises. A B Corp certification adds the most of any single certification, because it reflects a verified, company-wide standard. Others — like Fair Trade, 1% for the Planet, or a validated climate target — each add a more modest lift.
• Controversies pull it down. The penalty scales with how serious the issue is: a minor concern nudges the rating down a little, while a severe or critical problem docks a lot. The most serious issues also ripple beyond their own category — because a major failure in one area usually signals something broader about how a company is run.

Where these show up on a brand's page

On a brand's page you'll see a Certifications & Commitments section and a Reported Controversies section, each noting how it affected the rating. Reported controversies are drawn from public sources and clearly flagged as allegations we haven't independently verified — their inclusion doesn't imply wrongdoing. Where a review found that a finding belongs to a parent company or a supplier rather than to this brand, it stays on the page labelled that way and doesn't count; where the source didn't support the claim at all, it's removed.

How we protect smaller brands

A small brand that doesn't publish a giant sustainability report isn't penalized for it. Missing paperwork isn't the same as bad behavior.

Big corporations have the staff to document everything; small and independent brands often don't, even when their actual practices are strong. If we rated purely on how much a company publishes, we'd punish exactly the kind of brands many shoppers want to support.

So when a brand has little public data, we nudge its rating toward the middle of the pack rather than dragging it to the bottom. This only ever helps — a rating is never pushed down because a brand is quiet.

Confidence and data coverage

You get told how sure we are, not just where a brand landed.

Alongside every rating we track two honesty signals: confidence (how sure we are of the read) and data coverage (how much public information there was to work with). When confidence is low, or coverage is simply too thin, no rating is forced onto the brand — it stays Rating pending.

Where this falls short

Every rating method has limits. Here are ours, stated plainly, so you can weigh a rating knowing what's behind it.

Coverage is uneven, and thin in places

We haven't assessed every brand on the market yet. Whole categories are sparse. Some brands are missing entirely. If a brand you're looking for isn't here, that's a gap in our coverage, not a judgment about the brand.

Coverage is also skewed toward brands with a public record. A company that reports, certifies and gets written about is easier to assess than a small private label that publishes nothing — so the brands you see rated are not a random sample of what's on the shelf.

What a certification does and doesn't prove

Certifications are the strongest evidence we have, which is exactly why it's worth being precise about what they mean. A certification proves that an outside body checked something specific, at a point in time, against its own standard. That's real, and it's why certifications carry weight here.

It is not proof that a company is good. It doesn't cover everything the company does — a certification may apply to one product line, one facility, or one part of a supply chain while the rest goes unexamined. Standards differ in how strict they are and how hard they audit. And certifications lapse: a badge on a brand's own website may be years out of date, which is why claims get checked against the issuing registry rather than taken from the brand.

So read a certification as what it is: verified evidence about a defined thing, not a character reference.

Why some brands stay "Rating pending"

A brand's rating stays pending when the evidence won't support a call. Usually that's one of four situations: there's too little public information to judge; the available information is too contradictory to resolve; we can't confidently identify the company actually responsible for the product; or we simply haven't got to it yet.

None of those mean the brand is bad, and none mean it's good. "Rating pending" is an admission about our information, not a finding about the company. A brand that would rate badly and a brand nobody has written about look identical from the outside, and collapsing that distinction into a rating would be the single easiest way to mislead you.

The rest of the fine print

• Ratings describe companies, not individual products. A well-run company can make a wasteful product, and a poorly-rated one can make a genuinely better item. The rating won't catch that.
• Product tags aren't reviewed. The attributes on a product card — BPA-free, organic, plastic-free and the rest — are read off the listing's own metadata and shown as the seller states them. They never feed a brand's rating, and unlike certifications they aren't checked one by one. More on that.
• Public evidence lags reality. Reporting is published on a delay, and a company that changed course this year may not show it in the record for another one.
• Controversies are reported, not adjudicated. They come from public sources and are flagged as allegations we haven't independently verified.
• Absence of a controversy isn't a clean record. It often just means nobody has reported on that company.
• We get things wrong. When you find one, tell us — corrections from readers are among the better signals we get, and they get acted on.

Where the product information comes from

We read the public Amazon listing — the same page you're looking at when you shop.

The product title, photos, price, star rating, brand, and category all come straight from the item's public Amazon page. That's the same information anyone can see; we gather it up and add a sustainability layer on top.

We don't touch your account, your cart, your orders, or anything private. Nothing shown here is based on your personal shopping history.

How we figure out which company actually makes a product

The name on a listing isn't always the company responsible — so we trace it back to the one that is.

Sustainability practices are set at the company level, not the individual-product level. But a listing might show a random storefront name, a marketplace seller, or a small label owned by a much larger parent company. To rate the right organization, three things happen:

• Ignore generic marketplace names. Sellers and storefronts that aren't the actual maker (including plain "Amazon" listings) are set aside — they don't tell us who's responsible for how something is made.
• Identify the real brand. The genuine brand behind the product is worked out from the listing itself.
• Trace sub-brands to their parent. Many familiar brands are owned by a larger company that sets the real environmental and labor standards. When that's the case, the smaller brand inherits its parent's record.

A quick example

Say a smaller label is wholly owned by a large parent corporation. On its own the label may publish very little, but the practices that matter — factories, sourcing, labor standards — are its parent's. So we attach the parent's verified record to it, rather than pretending the sub-brand exists in a vacuum. If we can't confidently match a product to a real company, we'd rather leave its rating pending than guess.

How a company's practices get researched

A purpose-built research agent goes and reads the public record for us — and it's only allowed to read from a short list of places, with a link attached to everything it brings back.

A company's environmental and labor record is scattered: some of it on the company's own site, some in certifier directories, some in reporting and regulatory filings. Gathering that by hand for every brand doesn't scale, so we built a research agent to do the reading. It answers the same fixed set of questions about every brand, in the same order — so a small label and a multinational get asked exactly the same things.

It's pointed at three kinds of sources, and it's built not to wander outside them:

• The company's own public pages — sustainability, impact, materials, factories, supplier codes of conduct.
• Certifier directories — B Lab, GOTS, Fair Trade, Climate Neutral, 1% for the Planet and the rest, where the certifier itself publishes who holds what.
• Credible public reporting — news outlets, regulatory bodies, court filings, and advocacy reporting with a named reporter behind it. Anonymous forum and social posts are ruled out explicitly; they don't count as a source here.

The rule that does the most work: every claim has to arrive with a direct quote and a working link. A finding with no quote, or with no source we can open, is dropped before it ever reaches a page — it isn't shown as "probably true," it simply doesn't count. The same goes for vague marketing language: "We care deeply about our planet" is recorded as vague and earns nothing, while a published, specific commitment with a citable source does.

Does the agent decide the rating?

No. It researches; it doesn't judge. Its job ends at a structured set of answers with evidence attached. The rating is then calculated from those answers by fixed rules applied identically to every brand — the same certification is worth the same amount everywhere, and the same severity of controversy costs the same everywhere. That separation is deliberate: it means a rating can be re-derived and checked, rather than resting on a model's opinion of a company.

What we check by hand before it counts

The two things that move a rating most — certifications and controversies — are the two things a person reads the source for, not just a machine.

Any system that reads the web can get things wrong. It can misread a page, credit a parent company's record to a small subsidiary, or report a certification a brand genuinely held five years ago and has since let lapse. So the claims carrying the most weight aren't taken on trust.

First, an automatic cross-check. Where a certifier publishes its own searchable registry — B Corp, USDA Organic, ENERGY STAR, EPA Safer Choice, Leaping Bunny, 1% for the Planet — every certification claim is checked against it. A claim the registry actively contradicts, such as a certification that has lapsed or been revoked, is taken off the page rather than displayed.

Then, human review of what's left. Two queues, worked in order of how much the answer would change:

• Certification claims no registry could confirm. Each one gets looked up in the certifier's own database by hand. Confirmed there, it counts in full. Backed only by the brand's own website, it stays visible and clearly labelled as the brand's claim, but carries far less weight. Not found at all, the claim is stripped out.
• Controversies serious enough to affect a rating. The source gets opened and read. From there a finding is confirmed as reported; downgraded in severity if it was overstated (it stays on the page, it just stops driving the rating); marked resolved if the company has since addressed it; re-labelled as a parent company's or supplier's conduct rather than this brand's (it stays on the page, labelled, and doesn't count toward the rating — you're still buying from them); or removed entirely if the source doesn't actually support it.

To be straight with you about scope: this is ongoing work, not a finished sweep. The queues are deliberately ordered by consequence, so the claims that would change a brand's rating get read first, and lower-stakes ones wait their turn. Minor findings that can't affect a rating are displayed as-is, as reported by the source.

Product details come straight from the listing

"BPA-free," "organic," "plastic-free" and the other tags on a product card are read off the listing itself. They're the seller's claims about the item, and unlike brand ratings they aren't reviewed one by one.

A brand rating and a product tag are two different kinds of information, held to two different standards, and it's worth knowing which you're looking at.

Product tags come from the listing's own metadata — the title, the bullet points, the specification table, and structured fields supplied with the listing data, such as Amazon's own Climate Pledge Friendly designation. Those get matched and shown on the card, and they're what the category filters run on when you narrow by an attribute.

Nobody hand-verifies them. If a listing says "BPA-free" and it isn't, the card will repeat it. And they're kept separate from the rating in both directions: a product tag never moves a company's rating up or down, and a company's rating never adds a tag to a product.

How fresh the information is

Prices are refreshed every day, straight from Amazon — and when we're not sure a price is current, the page says so instead of guessing.

Updated prices are pulled from Amazon daily, so what you see stays close to the live number. Sustainability information updates as new public reports, certifications, and records become available.

If a daily price refresh is ever missed, you don't get shown a stale figure. It's replaced with a simple "See price on Amazon" link so you can check the real, current price before you decide.

How we make money — and why it never touches the ratings

Money and ratings are kept completely separate. A brand can't pay for a better rating, and we're never paid to rank one product above another.

Leif List is free to use. We earn in two disclosed ways:

• Amazon Associates. When you buy through an Amazon link on this site, we may earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you. (You'll see this noted at the bottom of every page.)
• Partner brands. A handful of brands are affiliate partners, so some products link to the brand's own store instead of Amazon. If you buy there, we may earn a small commission — same as Amazon, at no extra cost to you.

Here's the firewall that matters: none of that money influences a rating or a ranking. Ratings come only from the sustainability data. The order products appear in comes from that rating plus the values you choose to prioritize — never from who pays us. A partner brand is rated and ranked exactly like every other brand; being a partner only changes where the buy link points.