Honesty needs a definition
This is it
It sets out how much of the story a company owes you about what it sells. Not whether the product is good, whether you were told.
Six qualities that disclosure must have.
Each module is one question. Asked of everything a product should tell you, the six together give it a shape, the same shape the index publishes.
Empty, this is the standard.
Filled, it is a product. See one scored →
Is it disclosed, or is there silence?
The starting point, and the condition of the other five: if nothing is said, there is nothing whose clarity, balance or accuracy could be judged. A limitation stated openly counts as disclosure — the module rewards saying, not saying something favourable.
The six modules do not change. What changes is the information they are asked about.
The modules are qualities of conduct, not subject matter, so they hold for anything a person is asked to take, wear or trust.
Every criterion is written down, and the manual is public.
Each module carries its own criteria, written case by case. Every criterion scores on the same scale, and the six modules together compose the product's score.
Where a question does not apply to a kind of information, the cell is excluded,and declared in the manual, never counted against the product. Read the full manual →
Three things this standard is not.
A standard is defined as much by what it refuses to claim as by what it sets out. These three are limits on the method itself, and they hold in every version.
A judgementof the science
Whether a product works, and whether the research behind it was well designed, belongs to regulators and scientific review. The standard reads what was said about it.
Arecommendation
Nothing here indicates that a product is safe, effective, or preferable to another. A high score is not a better product, it is a better disclosure.
A verdict ona company
The unit of evaluation is a single product. Two products from the same manufacturer can sit four tiers apart, and often will.
Silence is the only thing this standard treats as absence.
Admitting a gap counts as telling. Staying quiet does not.
“This product has not been studied in adults over 65. No recommendation can be made for that group.”
“Well tolerated in adults. Consult your physician before use.”
Neither company did anything wrong in the laboratory. Only one of them told you.
What this version does not reach yet.
Unlike the perimeter, none of these are choices. They are the edges of a first version, each one declared in the manual, with the reason it exists.
No weighting by consumption.
A product used by two million people and one used by two hundred carry the same weight in the index. Consumption figures are not published anywhere the standard can read them.
Verification is only as wide as the record.
Where the public record is thin, verification is thin with it. A claim without a source to check against is recorded as not verifiable never as incorrect.
Consistency across channels is not yet a module.
Whether a company contradicts itself between its label, its site and its advertising is a real quality of disclosure. It is written, and held for a later version.
Some criteria await their parameters.
The criteria that require interpretive judgement apply at full scope only once the Standard Council sets their thresholds. Until then they are declared and applied narrowly.
Nobody can change it on their own. Not even us.
A private method can be quietly loosened when a large client complains. A standard cannot, because the person who wrote it is no longer the person who decides it. That is the whole difference, and these three rules are what enforce it.
No seat can change it alone.
A change needs a majority of the council. Qustas wrote the manual and holds one seat, the same single seat as everyone else. It cannot push a version through on its own, and it cannot block one either.
The rated industry never decides.
No company evaluated by the standard holds a seat, an observer place or a vote, and a change reaches the table through a seat, not through a form. The organisations that sit are the ones with an interest in the answer being right: health authorities, medical societies, patient associations.
Nothing already published is rewritten.
Every version stays available with the decision that produced it. Criterion numbers are never reused, so a score issued two versions ago can still be read against the exact text it was issued under. The standard moves forward; it does not edit its past.
© Qustas 2026. The criteria are published so that anyone can read what is being asked of a product. A QTS score or tier may only be issued by Qustas.
The council that approves changes is described in full on the About page. How Qustas is governed →
Version numbering reflects the maturity of the standard.