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Engineering Standard

Engineering Better Websites for People, the Planet & AI

Every website has an impact. It influences people, affects business performance, consumes electricity, transfers data, generates carbon emissions, and increasingly shapes the information understood by AI systems. Human Impact Certified measures those outcomes using a single evidence-based engineering standard.

Why Human Impact

Digital quality is bigger than conversion and rankings.

HIC translates technical delivery into human burden, physical digital-resource demand and machine understanding — then keeps the evidence visible so the result can be independently interpreted.

Foundation

Evidence before claims.

Measured evidence, modelled consequences and scenario assumptions are kept distinguishable. When evidence cannot be verified, HIC says so rather than manufacturing certainty.

HIC-300

Five engineering disciplines under one human-impact framework.

The technical disciplines explain why People, Planet and AI outcomes look the way they do.

01

Accessibility

Whether people can perceive, understand and operate the experience.

02

Performance

How efficiently useful content reaches a person across the critical delivery path.

03

Sustainability

Data transfer, device/network demand, electricity and avoidable digital waste.

04

AI Readability

Whether machines can identify the entity, relationships and reliable facts.

05

Technical Quality

Semantic, security, discovery and engineering foundations underneath the page.

Understand the result

Every score should explain itself.

HIC reports are designed to answer four questions repeatedly: what was measured, why it matters, what was found, and what the evidence means in practice.