Methodology

What we publish

Phase 1 of Compare ITAD is a neutral directory of IT asset disposition vendors with North American operations. Each profile contains:

• The vendor’s name, headquarters, and primary website.
• A self-reported description of the company, presented verbatim from the vendor’s own About page. We do not paraphrase, improve, or summarize this copy.
• Certifications the vendor claims, with verification status.
• Facilities the vendor lists publicly, with city, state, and ownership type.
• Services the vendor offers, in the vendor’s own words.
• Industries served, where stated.
• Provenance metadata: the URL where data was sourced, when it was crawled, and when an editor last reviewed it.

What we do not publish

To preserve the directory’s neutrality, Phase 1 explicitly excludes:

• Vendor reviews, scores, or rankings by subjective quality.
• Head-to-head “A vs B” comparison pages with editorial judgments.
• Paid inclusion or paid placement. Listing in the directory is editorial and cannot be bought, and no payment moves a vendor up a results page. Verification and referral economics are described in full at /verification and /commercial-model.

How vendors are added

We populate the directory in two passes:

1. Crawl. Our crawler extracts only self-reported factual claims from each vendor’s public website — name, headquarters, certifications, facilities, services. The crawler records the source URL for every field. It does not extract testimonials, case-study customer names, or marketing superlatives.
2. Editorial review. Before a record is published, an editor confirms the basic facts, flags any claims that look stale, and runs the verification checks described below. A record without a verified primary source URL and a recent review timestamp is never published.

How certifications are verified

Vendors commonly list industry certifications on their websites. Compare ITAD treats a claim as self-reported until it has been cross-referenced against the issuing authority’s public registry. Verified certifications get a green checkmark badge; self-reported certifications get a neutral grey pill.

• R2v3 / R2:2013 — verified against the R2 Certified Facility Registry.
• NAID AAA — verified against the NAID AAA Member Directory.
• e-Stewards — verified against the e-Stewards Certified Recycler Directory.
• ISO certifications — verified through the named accrediting body (ANAB, UKAS, etc.) when the issuer is identified.
• SOC 2 Type II — cannot be publicly verified. Always remains self-reported.

How we keep records current

M&A activity in ITAD is constant. Every published vendor record carries a last_verified_at timestamp. Records older than 90 days surface in the editorial dashboard for re-verification. When a vendor is acquired, we either merge the record into the acquirer’s profile or annotate the verification notes.

Vendors can speed this up by claiming their listing. Verified representatives can submit corrections, which enter our moderation queue before publication. Anyone can report a correction on any profile.

ITAD risk assessment — scoring algorithm

The Compare ITAD risk assessment is deterministic. Five questions, four to five answer choices each, with a fixed score per answer (0–4 where 4 = best practice and 0 = highest risk). The published algorithm:

1. Each answer carries an integer score (0, 1, 2, or 4).
2. Total score = sum of all five answers (range 0–20). Visibility score = (total / 20) × 100, rounded to the nearest integer.
3. Risk level is derived from the visibility score:
   • 80–100% — Low Risk
   • 60–79% — Moderate Risk
   • 40–59% — Elevated Risk
   • 0–39% — Critical Risk
4. Each answer also carries a written, gap-closure recommendation that appears in the PDF report. Recommendations describe what closing the gap looks like; they do not recommend specific vendors.

The questions cover policy & governance, data destruction method, documentation & certificates, chain of custody, and value recovery. The full text of every question, every answer, and the score it carries lives in the public source code at lib/assessment.ts.

Consultation referral — matching criteria

When a user completes the assessment, they may optionally opt in to be connected with ITAD vendors in our directory. The opt-in is unchecked by default and sits beside a plain-language description of what we will do with the user’s contact information. A user who does not opt in still receives the full PDF report; no vendor ever sees their contact details.

When a user does opt in, the matching algorithm runs against the published vendor directory using the criteria below, in this order of weight:

1. Geographic proximity. Vendor must operate at least one facility within ~500 miles of the user’s location (state-level centroids; vendor facility coordinates when available).
2. Scale alignment. Vendor’s reported segment (mid-market vs enterprise via employee-count range) is preferred to match the user’s inferred organization size; unknowns apply a soft penalty rather than a hard filter.
3. Service alignment. Vendor must offer at least two of the service categories implied by the user’s answers (e.g. chain-of-custody when the user reports no chain-of-custody tracking; value-recovery when the user reports no value recovery program).
4. Certification gate. Vendor must hold at least R2v3 or e-Stewards with a verification status of verified (cross-checked against the issuing registry by our editorial team). Self-reported certifications are not sufficient for referral.

Up to three vendors are returned, ordered by total match score. Phase 1 simplification: matched vendors do not receive the user’s contact details automatically. Instead, our editorial team receives an internal notification with the proposed matches, reviews the pairings within 24 hours, and either forwards the lead with the user’s consent or escalates if the match quality is poor. Phase 2 will introduce automated routing once we have data showing the matches are landing well; that change will be disclosed here first.

Vendors pay Compare ITAD a referral fee on business that closes. The fee is the same regardless of which vendor a buyer selects, so it cannot influence which vendors are matched or in what order. Every active commercial relationship is listed in the disclosure table at /commercial-model. Buyers pay nothing.

Disclosure

Compare ITAD does not accept payment for placement, ranking, or coverage, and no payment can alter a verification result. Sponsored placements, where they appear, are labeled in line with FTC guidelines on the page where they appear. What vendors can and cannot pay for is set out in full at /commercial-model.

If you spot anything on this site that reads as editorial judgment of a vendor — a ranking, a “best of” label, a quality score — please report it so we can fix it.