Something moved in the last twelve months and almost nobody in marketing noticed. Searches for what greenwashing means went down. Searches for the seven sins of greenwashing went up, and not by a little.
Read that again. People are not trying to understand the idea any more. They already understand it. They are looking for the checklist to catch you with, and sustainability claims are the first thing they run it against.
Which means the person reading your About page is not reading. They are auditing. And they are doing it quietly, before they ever write to you, so you never find out that you failed.
The useful question is no longer how do we talk about our impact. It is what do our sustainability claims have to survive now. And there is a free answer sitting in a document most brands will never open: the annual environmental report of the company that owns the search box.
Why read a 117 page report from a company nothing like yours
Google is not your peer. It runs data centers, you might run a refill shop or a foundation with four staff. But it publishes under a level of scrutiny nobody else faces, from regulators, journalists and its own critics, and it has spent eleven annual reports learning how to write a number that does not come back to bite it.
That craft is transferable to sustainability claims of any size, and it is free. What follows is five things the 2026 report does, with the evidence, and what each one looks like when you have no sustainability department and no budget.
1. Name your own trade-off before anyone else finds it
The awkward fact about Google right now is that its AI buildout is growing faster than the electricity grid is getting clean. That is the sentence a critic would use against them.
It appears in their executive summary, on page four, in the opening paragraph. Not buried in an appendix. They say the path to their climate ambitions will not be linear, and they say why, before they say anything good about themselves.
Then the good news lands harder, because you already know they are not hiding: electricity demand up 37 percent in a single year, and operational emissions still down 2 percent.
What this looks like for you
Find the thing about your operation you would least like a customer to ask about. The shipping. The one supplier you have not audited. The product line that undoes the rest. Put it in your own words, on your own page, before someone else puts it in theirs.
This is not self-sabotage. A brand that names its own weak spot reads as a brand that knows its own numbers. A brand that names only wins reads as a brand with something behind its back.
2. Say exactly which numbers were checked, and by whom
Google does not claim its whole report is verified. It says it obtains limited third party assurance, from an independent auditor, for certain metrics. It names the auditor, Ernst and Young, and it marks in the data tables which specific figures were reviewed and which were not.
That is a company with the resources to check everything choosing to tell you it did not. Because a reader who knows which numbers are audited will trust those numbers. A reader who is told everything is verified, and later finds out otherwise, will trust none of them.
What this looks like for you
You are not hiring an auditor and nobody expects you to. But you can write one honest line: our packaging figures come from our supplier’s certificate, our energy figures are our own meter readings, and neither has been externally verified.
It costs nothing, it takes a sentence, and it does more for your credibility than a badge you designed yourself. A self made seal is decoration. A stated source is evidence.
3. Publish the method, not just the number
When Google wanted to say how much energy an AI prompt uses, it did not lead with the number. It published a technical paper explaining how it measures energy, emissions and water for a prompt, and only then gave the figures: a median text prompt uses 0.24 watt hours, emits 0.03 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent, and consumes about a quarter of a millilitre of water.
The reason is simple. Anyone can dispute a number. Almost nobody disputes a number when the method is on the table, because now the argument is about methodology, which is a conversation, not an accusation.
What this looks like for you
Next to any figure on your site, answer three questions in one line: what period does it cover, what is it measured against, and where did the data come from. Fifty percent less packaging waste means nothing. Packaging waste per order fell by half between 2024 and 2025, measured by weight of material shipped is a claim somebody can check, which is precisely why they will not bother.
4. Define what your number leaves out
Deep in the endnotes, where Google states the plastic weight of its hardware, it lists what that weight excludes: circuit boards, labels, cables, connectors, coatings, adhesives and more.
Nobody was going to catch that. They wrote it anyway, because a number without a boundary is not a number, it is an impression. And an impression is the thing that gets quoted back at you when the boundary turns out to be smaller than the reader assumed.
What this looks like for you
Every claim you make has a boundary. Carbon neutral usually means one part of the business, in one year, with offsets. Recycled packaging often means the box and not the tape, the filler or the label. Say which. The sentence that defines your limit is the sentence that protects the rest of the page.
5. Admit that measurement is a choice
The most quietly radical line in the whole report is in the methodology notes. Google states that different but acceptable measurement techniques can produce materially different measurements, and that the precision of those techniques varies.
In plain language: two honest companies measuring the same thing can publish different numbers, and neither is lying. Saying so out loud removes the assumption that a single figure is the truth, which is the assumption that makes every later correction look like a cover up.
What this looks like for you
If your number changes next year because you changed how you count, say that it changed because you changed how you count. Restating a figure with an explanation is housekeeping. Restating it silently is what turns a small correction into a story.
The five tests your sustainability claims have to pass
Strip the five rules back and you get the checklist your own page has to survive. Run it on the three loudest claims on your site.
- Specific. Which part of the business, by how much, compared to when.
- Substantiated. Is there a document a stranger could read without emailing you for it.
- Verified. Did anyone outside your company check it, and do you say who.
- Complete. Does it stay quiet about something bigger.
- Current. When was it last true. A line from two years ago on a live page is a claim you are making today.
The fourth is the one that fails, and it is the expensive one. Most brands that get called out did not lie. They passed four tests and failed that one. A true claim that stays quiet about the bigger thing reads as deliberate even when it was only an oversight, and by the time you are explaining that, the room has already made up its mind.
The instinct to say less is also wrong
Faced with all this, plenty of brands go quiet. It feels safe. It is not. Saying nothing about your impact reads as having nothing to say, and in a category built on values, silence is itself a claim.
The way out is not quieter claims. It is smaller ones you can defend. A small claim you can prove beats a big one you cannot, and it ages better, which matters more than it sounds, because the page you write this week is the page somebody audits next year.
What to do this week
Open your own site. Find the three claims you make most loudly, the ones in the hero, the About page and the footer. Run all five tests on each. For any claim that fails, you have two moves: shrink it until it is true, or go and get the proof.
Then add the sentence almost nobody adds, the one that says where your numbers come from and who checked them. It is the cheapest credibility available to a small brand, and the reason it works is that so few people are willing to write it.
This is the work we do with brands whose sustainability is real and whose website does not show it. If that sounds like yours, our marketing for sustainable brands and sustainable branding work starts exactly here, with what you can actually prove.
If you want the step by step version, with the FTC Green Guides, the certifications that hold up and seven claims rewritten line by line, we published a practical guide to green claims earlier this year.
Sources
- Google Environmental Report 2026, published by Google. Executive summary, methodology notes, assurance statement and endnotes.
- Google Trends, rising and top queries for greenwashing terms, United States, twelve month window, read August 2026.
The five questions above work best with a page to write on. We made one:
The Claim Check
Five questions to answer before a sustainability claim goes out, with room to write your answers. If you cannot answer one of them, that is the part you will be asked about.
One email with the file. No list you cannot leave.
Kurt Whitt
Planet Media
Founder and CEO of Planet Media, a sustainability focused marketing agency. 25+ years helping purpose driven brands grow through strategy, storytelling and design.
More about the team