Building Citable ESG Orgs.: a directory designed to be cited by AI

The challenge
ESG and sustainability organisations earn real credentials – B Corp, EcoVadis, CDP, ISO – then struggle to be found by the people who matter: clients, customers, procurement teams, investors and journalists. Those audiences increasingly begin with an AI assistant, which answers from a few structured, trusted sources. Generic directories and PDF reports give AI systems little to read or verify, so credible organisations remain invisible at the moment a decision is made.

The approach
The Ethical Agency set out to build a directory designed to be cited, not just browsed. The principle: turn an organisation's verified ESG work into machine-readable evidence. Three commitments shaped it:

Structure everything. Every profile emits schema.org JSON-LD and feeds an open dataset, so certifications, SDG alignment, emissions data and services are unambiguous to a machine.
Make verification transparent. Claims are cross-referenced against 24 recognised platforms, and every profile shows a clear status – platform-verified, user-verified or self-declared – so nothing reads as verified when it is not.
Stay honest. No vague claims, no invented metrics, and self-declared data is labelled as such.

What we built
Citable ESG Orgs. is a B2B directory and communication hub. A free profile carries certifications, SDG alignment, reviews and structured data. A Pro tier adds publishing and service packages. Organisations publish articles, press releases, reports and events, each an indexed, citable page linked to a verified profile. A dedicated Scope 3 Supplier Readiness section helps suppliers demonstrate their readiness for supply-chain ESG requests. An AI Citability Score shows each organisation, in plain terms, how discoverable it is to AI models and what to improve next.