Society has invested heavily in voluntary corporate sustainability reporting. In theory, these disclosures do real work: they could help civil-society groups, analysts, and other stakeholders hold firms accountable for externalities that regulation leaves untouched, and they could help markets price risks that financial statements miss. In practice, critics dismiss the reports as mere marketing. They are often unassured and therefore not credible, not comparable across firms or over time, vague rather than verifiable, and cherry-picked to shield bad news.

An entire industry has grown up around fixing these disclosures. Nonprofits and shareholders press companies to say more. Standard-setters have built an alphabet soup of voluntary frameworks, including GRI, SASB, TCFD, CDP, and SBTi. Firms increasingly pay for external assurance, and newer mandatory regimes often piggyback on the voluntary frameworks. But this entire enterprise has proceeded without basic facts about what the reports actually contain, or whether the frameworks firms adopt track better disclosure. The reason is simple: reading thousands of heterogeneous PDFs at scale has been prohibitively expensive.

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