How PepsiCo redesigned its sustainability reporting for the AI era - Trellis Group

Communications How PepsiCo redesigned its sustainability reporting for the AI era The food and beverage giant now favors regular web updates over lengthy PDF reports. Read More By Jim Giles August 21, 2026 PepsiCo's sustainability reporting is design to be read by AI as well as humans. Source: Shutterstock. PepsiCo’s sustainability team has refocused its annual sustainability reporting to meet the needs of the AI bots that are becoming increasingly important consumers of online information. Many companies publish lengthy sustainability reports and accompanying data tables, usually as PDFs. But the bots that crawl the internet for information to add to ChatGPT, Claude and other AI models find PDFs more challenging than webpages to navigate. To accommodate this new class of readers, the PepsiCo team made a series of tweaks to its publishing strategy. Webpages over PDFs The food and beverage company published a 2025 ESG summary in PDF form, but at 20 pages the document is less than half the length of the 2024 version . Some of the information that used to appear in the document can now be found on PepsiCo’s ESG Topics A-Z webpage , which includes sections on agriculture, environmental impact and other issues. Regular updates, not “an avalanche” “What we’ve been doing from a reporting or communications perspective is we hold all the information and then we put it all out once,” said Dan Strechay, a senior director on PepsiCo’s Global Corporate Affairs team. “Then it’s a huge avalanche of information,” he added — some of which inevitably gets lost. PepsiCo now makes regular updates to its A-Z pages instead, sometimes in anticipation of heightened interest and additional AI queries on a particular topic. The A-Z page on water use, for example, was updated with the latest data ahead of this month’s World Water Week. “We take a modular approach in partnership with our reporting team and our legal and control colleagues,” said Strechay. “We say, ‘As soon as the information’s ready let’s put it out.’” AI-friendly page structures PepsiCo’s A-Z pages make careful use of section headings, bullet points and other formatting that creates a clear structure. “Clearly delineating subsection headers and consistent sections — you know, it sounds kind of mundane,” said Anna Palazij, the company’s vice president for sustainability. But, she added, it makes a difference in how AI is able to parse the page. The pages are also timestamped so that readers — humans and machines — can immediately see how fresh the information is. What success looks like Palazij and Strechay still want human readers to visit PepsiCo’s webpages and download the company’s reports. But in an era of AI services that are designed to directly answer questions rather than redirect users elsewhere, as traditional search engines do, they say it’s more important that users get the correct information — be that on a company webpage or via an AI chatbot. “If it’s coming through correctly on Claude, that’s fine,” said Palazij. “But if it’s not, then that could actually be a detriment. Which is one of the reasons why we tried to make the data accessible by AI.” Subscribe to Trellis Briefing Get real case studies, expert action steps and the latest sustainability trends in a concise morning email. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form. Email address * utmCampaignLast utmMediumLast utmSourceLast Subscribe Jim Giles Jim Giles is Vice President, Editor-at-Large at Trellis Group. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, Economist, Guardian, Nature and other publications. He was the co-founder of Matter, an award-winning investigative publication that was acquired by Medium in 2013. In 2017, he was a graduate of the Sulzberger Executive Leadership Program at Columbia University. He's also worked as a strategic consultant for several high-impact organizations, including the European Climate Foundation and the Wellcome Trust. Featured Reports Sponsored Solving for Scope 3: From Data to Action Sponsored Turning Bottlenecks into Advantage: Future-Proofing the AI Infrastructure Value Chain The State of the Sustainability Profession in 2026 Sponsored Data Matters from Sphera, a discussion on LCA data quality Sponsored Microsoft’s Carbon Removal Pause Signals a Moment for Buyer Action How to Set Sustainability Strategy in 2025 Sponsored Powering Growth: How Business and Utilities Meet Surging Electricity Demand Sponsored From Volatility to Stability: Challenging the Age of Oil-Based Plastics The State of Biodiversity and Business 2024 Track the latest sustainability reports from major companies Sponsored What to Look for in Enterprise Carbon Management Software Sponsored Understanding the GHG Protocol’s New Scope 2 Granularity Proposal 1,105 corporate sustainability reports published in 2025 Sponsored Turning waste into scope emission wins What to know about carbon markets in 2026