You have already written your best sentence. It is just in the wrong place.

Every homepage has a distance: the number of words a reader travels before the page says something only that company could say. Yours has one whether or not anybody has ever counted it, and it was set by whoever wrote the page in the order they happened to think of things.

The question sitting on your desk is what the additional words in front of your best sentence are currently buying you.

On 13 August 2026 I read the homepages of twenty-seven funded climate and energy transition companies, looking for the first sentence a direct competitor could not publish unchanged and truthfully. I re-read all twenty-seven on 24 August.

The median company has seventeen words in front of its best sentence. A quarter have five or fewer, and a quarter have forty-six or more.

One has 296.

The Explanation

Two rules:

What counts as differentiating? A sentence qualifies if it carries a company-specific number, a named mechanism or material, a named product, site or partner, or a proposition true of that company and not of its category. Mission statements fall outside it, as do superlatives with nothing underneath them, and so does dropping a company name into a sentence that would otherwise suit anybody.

What counts as a word? Page copy means headlines, subheadings, body text and captions. The menu, the cookie dialog and the news strip pinned above the hero sit outside it.

So what do companies start with if not the sentence that defines and differentiates them?

Almost always, the category.

Form Energy's homepage opens "ENERGY STORAGE FOR A BETTER WORLD". The line is well made, the company can afford the observation, and taking the name off would have fooled nobody. Iron-air chemistry, the thing only Form Energy can say, comes sixty-four words later.

Apply one test to each page. Could a direct competitor publish this line, unchanged, tomorrow morning? On most of the pages I read, yes, which means the most-read line on the page is being spent telling a reader which industry they are in. Most readers arrived already knowing that, because the link that brought them said so. Search traffic and a pasted URL are the exceptions, and a subheading can carry the category for them.

The three who spend the top line on a claim

Three of the twenty-seven score zero (in a good way) because the claim is in the headline.

Brimstone

A mechanism, stated as a claim, in the position of maximum attention. What makes it work is that it is mildly implausible. A reader who knows anything about cement stops, because producing all of that from a single rock is not how any of this is supposed to work, and the surprise creates an obligation to explain that the rest of the page then discharges.

Verdagy

Unglamorous, and it does more work than any aspiration would. "In operation" is the phrase the whole sector is quietly assessing everyone on, because the distance between a demonstration and a running unit is most of a diligence conversation.

Charm Industrial

No number and no mechanism, and no competitor could truthfully use it. The standard is a sentence nobody else could honestly write.

A fourth company scores zero by a different route. Above its headline Terra runs a single small line: "Cleburne, TX", then a dash, then "Industrial plant under construction". The headline underneath, "Welcome to the new cement age.", is a line anybody in cement could write. The line above it names a plant, a town and a stage of construction, and only one company can. It is fifty characters, and it sits in the space most companies leave empty.

The long end

Fifteen of the twenty-seven have twenty words or fewer in front, which is a headline and a subheading. That is the encouraging half of this, and it is most of the sample.

The other end is worth looking at squarely. One homepage runs 296 words of platform language before it says anything a competitor could not have written. That is most of a page to travel before the point arrives, and it is well beyond the reach of moving a subheading.

The count is a proxy for how long somebody was asked to wait, and 296 words is a long wait for a stranger who arrived from a link.

What the scroll actually costs

A reader landing on your homepage has not started reading yet. They are deciding whether to. The first screen is an audition.

Every scroll is a small decision, and on most of these pages you are asking for one while the reason to say yes is still out of sight. What they have to go on is a category noun and a destination, and they could have got both from any of your competitors. The sentence that would have earned the scroll is sitting just underneath, waiting for somebody who has already gone.

That is the real cost, and it's not counted in words. Seventeen words is nothing to read. It is a great deal to wait through when the reason to keep going is still three lines away. And 296 words is not a homepage that runs slightly long. It is a company asking a stranger for a page and a half of patience before it says the one thing that might have kept them.

Why the good line ends up second

Most founders are building something they know about, something they're passionate about. But they never learned the best way to say it. They needed to get something on a page and then used that format again and again because their time, focus and energy is spent on doing what they do best: innovating and building.

There is a second reason. Stated cold at the top, a claim in this sector does sound like every other claim in the sector, so the instinct is to lay a runway of credibility and land the claim once the reader has been prepared for it. The instinct correctly identifies the risk, and then reaches for delay, when the thing that actually works is specificity. A generic claim becomes distinctive by becoming concrete.

Advocacy runs in the opposite direction. A skeleton argument opens with the question the court has to decide, because a judge who does not yet know what is at issue reads everything that follows without a place to put it. You win a reader's attention with the sharp thing and spend it on the context.

The fix

Open your homepage and read down until you hit the first sentence a competitor could not publish. Count the words in front of it, headline included, skipping the menu and the cookie notice.

Twenty or fewer puts you in the better half of this sample. Forty-six or more puts you in the slowest quarter.

Then ask what those words are earning. Most of these companies already have the sentence. It is just in the wrong place. On a fair number of pages it needs sharpening as well as moving, and the promotion costs length: the sentence that survives being first is usually longer than the one it replaces.

The Sentence

A headline I built (invented) to show the shape:

Every word of it would sit comfortably on a competitor's site.

The subheading that tends to sit one line below a headline like that:

Better, and still a rung short, because a reader outside the industry does not know what the temperature buys them.

Promoted and finished:

Cost parity without a subsidy is the investable fact. On a page built the first way it is still there, sitting two inferences below a temperature and one line below a slogan.

Could a competitor publish this unchanged? If yes, it is doing nothing for you.

So what? Ask it of your best sentence until the answer nails what only you can do.

The Ruling

Worth noting for anyone who assumes a link will carry the context.

On 9 April 2025 the ASA upheld a complaint by Adfree Cities against TotalEnergies SE over a paid-for advertisement on X. The caption stated, "Uncover how TotalEnergies' electricity start-up accelerator program has supported start-ups like Nash Renewables", and the video described NASH Renewables' work optimising the design of wind and solar farms. TotalEnergies pointed to its website for the fuller picture.

The ASA considered that the advertisement was "not limited by time or space to the extent that information which contextualised the significance of their green activities and progress could not have been included". It noted that "[t]he caption had used 117 characters of a possible 280, and the video was 30 seconds in length".

It then distinguished between two websites. The one reached by clicking the advertisement carried further information. The other, www.roadstocarbonneutral.com, was the address named in the video, and of that one the ASA said: "While the latter website suggested TotalEnergies was attempting to lower its environmental impact, it did not make clear the significance of their progress towards carbon neutrality in relation to their wider business activities."

What the ASA decided was narrower than either sentence, and it turned on content. In its words, "information about the proportion of TotalEnergies' overall business model that comprised lower-carbon energy products was material information that should have been included".

The layout argument I have been making all the way through this issue is mine, and a regulator has not endorsed it. What the ruling gives you is the harder point underneath it. A space constraint will not excuse an omission where you had the space, and the caption in question had used 117 characters of 280.

Next issue: what a government does when the payback runs longer than anyone's business plan, and what that tells you about the sentence you are writing.

If you would like to see the full table this article is based on, reply to the email version and I will send it.

If you want help explaining something difficult or putting your sentences in a better order, that is what I do.