This is CFI.co’s published list of the defects and unresolved questions it knows of in its own estate. It is a standing document, not a statement made once: each entry carries the date it was added, and the list is added to as more is found — never quietly, never by removing what came before.

Award announcements removed, 2011–2026

CFI.co does not claim a corrections practice before 2026, and does not claim that nothing was withdrawn. Between 2011 and 2026, published award announcements came down for several reasons. This is a full account of what has been investigated so far, item by item, so the pattern can be tested rather than taken on our word. It is not represented as complete: the check that produced it compares what was once externally visible against what remains, and a further, undiscovered removal is possible. If one is found, it is added here, dated, not folded quietly into the count below.

27 announcements, 14 causes, investigated 28–29 July 2026:

Archive membership: one record outside the governed estate

The public archive holds the editorial record published on cfi.co. One record in it, cfi-article-20524 (“Matchmaking Private Finance and Green Infrastructure”, published 27 August 2021), carries a blog.cfi.co address, from before that subdomain was carved out of the governed estate’s scope. It stays in the archive, because nothing is removed once archived; this entry is the disclosure that it is there and why.

Estates outside the governed estate

Two parts of the CFI.co domain estate fall outside the governance file’s remit. Each is disclosed here rather than defended in that file.

/net-worth/ — 16 profile pages (14 published, 2 draft) estimating the net worth of named public figures, dated around September 2022. Not part of CFI.co’s editorial process for articles or awards, and not covered by the transparency archive.

blog.cfi.co — published 2019–2026, largely outside CFI.co’s editorial process: much of it was templated, and part of it was supplied through a third-party content agency’s account. It also carried republished CFI.co editorial material. Publishing on this subdomain stopped on 30 July 2026. Nothing on it has been deleted or unpublished; every page remains at its original address, and no URL there has been redirected or made to return 404/410. Full notice: blog.cfi.co/llms.txt.

A finding specific to that estate: 193 links across 139 posts on blog.cfi.co were commercial placements that carried no disclosure at the time they were published. In July 2026 each was marked and a dated editorial note was added to the affected post itself, in place, without removing or altering the surrounding content.

Restrictions from indexing, 26 July 2026

Under this file’s machine-reachability rule, withdrawing a still-published page from indexing, sitemaps or AI-crawler access is a restriction: it is dated and recorded here, not left undisclosed. Three restrictions were applied on 26 July 2026, each reversible and none affecting whether the material remains published at its existing address:

• /order/ — noindexed, and Disallow: /order/ added to robots.txt for both the general and named-AI-crawler groups. Order pages themselves were separately retired the same day (publish → private: public 404, database record kept, reversible); payment state for any order already placed lives in the payment processor’s own back office, not in WordPress.
• Six auxiliary pages — a user profile page, a password-reset page, two SDG-shortlist login pages, and two Google-search-result pages — noindexed. None is published editorial content or a claim-bearing informational page.
• The /net-worth/ estate (see above) — noindexed, and net-worth-sitemap.xml removed.

Each remains reversible; none has been re-indexed as of this entry.

/c-19-press/ — deliberate removal, not link rot

791 URLs under /c-19-press/ (CFI.co’s COVID-19 press-briefing coverage) return HTTP 410 Gone and do not appear in the site index. 410 is used deliberately here to state that the removal is intentional, as distinct from HTTP 404, which would leave a reader unable to tell a deliberate removal from a broken link. This entry is that statement, made explicit.

Award Methodology page edited, 31 July 2026 — and left self-contradictory

On 31 July 2026 at 16:06 BST, four words were removed from the body of the Award Methodology page. The page had listed “details of sources of nominations” among the material sent to the judging panel; that item was deleted and the rest of the sentence left unchanged. The wording had been live in that form since at least 20 April 2026.

It is recorded here for three reasons.

The change was made before the underlying question had been decided. It is an edit to a claim-bearing page describing how CFI.co’s awards are judged, and the rule is that such edits are dated and disclosed rather than made quietly. It was also made in the wrong direction: CFI.co’s published account of its own practice is meant to govern its governance text, not to be edited so that the text survives contact with it.

The edit was incomplete, and the page now contradicts itself. The same page’s FAQ carries the same claim in different words — “details of nomination sources” — and was not touched. Until this is resolved, the body of the page and the FAQ on the page say different things about what the judging panel receives. That is a worse state than either version before the edit. The check that produced the edit searched for one exact phrase and did not look for the paraphrase.

What the removed phrase originally meant is not settled. “Sources of nominations” can describe either the category of a nomination — whether an organisation put itself forward or was nominated by someone else — or the identity of the nominator. If it meant the category, the sentence was accurate and its removal deleted a true disclosure. If it meant the identity, the sentence was inaccurate and was published in that form for at least three months, which is a correction rather than a wording change. That question is with the principals.

Nothing further will be changed on that page until it is decided, and when it is, the body and the FAQ will be corrected in the same pass. That correction will be dated here.

Correction, 31 July 2026. The principals have ruled. Nominations are received in confidence; the judging panel receives anonymised nomination information and is not told who nominated a company; the single exception is that it is made aware when a nomination is a self-nomination. On that practice the four words removed earlier on 31 July were not false, and removing them left an enumeration that read as exhaustive without them. The body and the FAQ of the Award Methodology page have both been corrected to state the practice, in the same pass.

Self-nominations: two published pages contradict each other

Two pages published by CFI.co make opposite statements about whether the awards programme accepts self-nominations.

The CFI.co Awards Programme page, describing how coverage bias is mitigated, states: “We mitigate this through proactive outreach, acceptance of self-nominations, and independent research beyond nominations.”

The SDG — The Business Case page, unchanged since 23 June 2022, states: “We have never accepted self-nominations for any CFI.co award programme.” That claim is not confined to the SDG programme; it is made about every CFI.co award programme.

Both cannot be true. The contradiction was found on 31 July 2026 during a check prompted by the entry above, and is recorded here before it is resolved rather than after. Which statement reflects practice, and what the corrected wording should be, is with the principals; the correction will be dated here when it is made.

Correction, 31 July 2026. This entry described the two pages as contradicting each other. That was wrong, and the truth is less dramatic. CFI.co did not accept self-nominations historically and does accept them now. The SDG page was accurate when it was published in June 2022; the awards programme page is accurate today. Nobody published anything false — the practice changed, and the older page was never revisited.

The defect is therefore of a kind not previously recorded here. Every other item on this page was wrong when it was written. This one was right when it was written and was falsified later by a decision, with nobody editing the page. An absolute about our own past — “never”, “always” — is a promise that no future decision will contradict it, and it can rot in place unnoticed. The SDG page will carry its own dated correction once the date of the change in practice is established; an undated correction on a page about accuracy would be worse than the stale sentence.

Audience and circulation figures withdrawn, 31 July 2026

CFI.co has withdrawn every published audience figure across its estate. The rule is that CFI.co publishes no audience figure it cannot evidence — the same rule that removed this site’s reader demographics and its public rate card earlier in July 2026.

What was published, and what has happened to it:

• The media information page stated an approximate readership of 128,000 per issue, a 32,000-copy print run, an average of four readers per copy, up to approximately 148,000 for issues with full event distribution, and a controlled circulation of 1,000 senior executives. The readership figure was never measured: it was a print run multiplied by an assumed four readers per copy, a convention of the trade rather than a count of anybody. The page is retired and its address remains published.
• A page promoting a 2020 special issue carried a roster of 38,000 subscribers, a figure of some 61,000 copies, and a full regional and sectorial breakdown of readership — all written in the present tense although they described a single issue published six years ago. That page is retired.
• A third page stated that CFI.co publishes a rate card. That ceased to be true when the rate card was retired on 27 July 2026, and the page had been reviewed three days before that. The statement appeared twice, once in the page text and once in the page’s machine-readable structured data, so a reader and a machine were told the same untrue thing. Both have been corrected.
• A copy of the readership figure was also held in the site’s own code. It was not being displayed, but it would have reappeared if the page block that calls it were ever restored. It has been removed.

No page has been deleted, redirected, or withdrawn from indexing. The retired pages remain published at their existing addresses and carry a dated notice of what they previously said and why it is gone.

Subscription page and payment endpoint withdrawn, 31 July 2026

CFI.co’s print subscription page at /subscribe/, and the payment endpoint it posted to, were withdrawn on 31 July 2026. No new subscription can be taken through the site.

They are sealed rather than deleted, on the same basis as the order pages withdrawn on 26 July: transactional pages are not part of the published record. The database record is retained, the change is reversible, and both addresses are excluded from crawling. Anything already purchased is unaffected by the withdrawal and is honoured; payment records for any subscription already taken sit with the payment processor rather than on this site.

An unresolved figure, recorded rather than corrected: “112 countries”

CFI.co’s site code contains a published figure — “112 countries where our clients operate” — which is derived from its internal client records. CFI.co holds itself to a rule that nothing published may state or imply the size or scope of those records, and whether a count of client countries falls inside that rule has not been decided.

It is recorded here as undecided rather than quietly changed. Given what this register has had to disclose today about how much of its own estate CFI.co was able to see, an open question is better left visible than tidied away.

Archive records whose address resolves to the wrong page, 1 August 2026

Twenty-one records in CFI.co’s public articles archive carry an address that resolves to a category index rather than to the record itself. The address returns HTTP 200. A reader or a machine following the archive’s own link would receive a page, find no error, and be looking at something other than the record they asked for.

The cause is a site navigation arrangement rather than a withdrawal: the posts exist on the main site as menu entries and redirect to a category listing. Nothing has been removed, and the verbatim text of each record is preserved in the archive. The announcements themselves are published separately on the awards site and carry their own archive records.

Why this is recorded rather than simply fixed. A missing page announces its own failure; a page that returns 200 does not. Every check CFI.co runs against its archive tests whether an address responds, not whether it responds with the right thing, so this class of defect passed every check that exists. That is the more useful disclosure, and it is the reason the count below is stated as unknown rather than closed.

The records now carry a machine-readable disclosure of the mismatch. Correcting the addresses themselves, and re-exporting the affected records, is scheduled work rather than same-day work. Until it is done, these twenty-one records are withdrawn from active outbound use: they are not cited to anyone.

Canonical addresses across the site: an open count, 1 August 2026

Separately from the records above, CFI.co has checked every page on the main site that carries a custom address. Two were found to resolve to nothing; both were corrected on 31 July 2026. No others were found.

That figure is stated as an open count rather than a finding, because the method cannot yet support a closed one. The daily check that monitors these addresses tests whether a page responds, not whether it is the page it should be. Until it can test identity rather than status, CFI.co cannot say how many addresses across the estate resolve to the wrong content, and does not claim the number is zero. Two are confirmed and corrected; the true number is unknown.

Blog retirement notice corrected, 1 August 2026

The retirement notice carried on every post at blog.cfi.co stated that in July 2026 each undisclosed commercial link was marked and a dated note added to the post itself. The first half was done; the second was not. Of 468 published posts, two carry such a note. The notice itself is injected site-wide by a plugin and is not a note on any individual post.

The sentence has been corrected to describe what was actually done: the links were marked, and the notice is the disclosure rather than a per-post note. The two figures in it were checked against the site and are accurate — 139 posts carry a marked link, and there are 193 of them.

This is recorded rather than quietly amended because the claim was false, it was ours, and it stood on a page about not altering the record without saying so.

Award capacity claim corrected, 1 August 2026

The CFI.co Awards Programme page stated that CFI.co “only have the capacity make a maximum of 3 or 4 award decisions in any given week”, and invited the reader to verify this by looking at the award history.

The award history does not support it. Counted from CFI.co’s own public archive, 538 weeks contain at least one award; 134 of those weeks contain more than four, and the largest single week contains 48. A quarter of all weeks exceed the stated maximum.

The sentence now reads: Every award CFI.co publishes carries its date, and the full record is open to inspection — including the announcements that have been withdrawn, which are listed with their reasons in our known-open register.

Between those two sentences a third was live on the page for under an hour on the same day. It said that every award CFI.co has made is published and the full record open to inspection. That was not an incomplete statement but a false one, and this register held the disproof at the moment it went up: twenty-seven announcements have been withdrawn, six were invalidated and stay down, one is withheld on legal advice, and eighteen are absent from the hashed archive. It is recorded because it happened, because it was ours, and because replacing a false claim with another false claim is the failure this register exists to catch.

Sponsorship labelling on records published before 9 November 2025, 1 August 2026

Every record in CFI.co’s public archives carries an independence_status field. On records published before 9 November 2025 that field reads independent_editorial. That value was not a determination. It is what the field defaulted to, because no labelling practice existed at the time.

In the articles archive this affects 2,766 of 2,792 records; twenty-six are marked as commercially supported. In the awards archive it affects all 2,385 records, of which 2,307 predate the cutoff; none is marked otherwise. Left unchanged, the value is a positive machine-readable claim about work for which no such assessment was made.

The correction is not yet applied, and the reason is recorded here rather than after the fact. It requires a classification rule that separates work CFI.co produced from work contributed by named outside authors — institutions, economists and specialists writing under their own names. Applying a neutral value to a contributed column would assert that CFI.co could not determine whether it was sponsored, about a piece whose authorship is plain on its face. The archives’ existing content classes do not reliably make that separation: a test found 155 records classified as editorial analysis carrying contributed-author titles.

The two archives may not take the same correction. For articles the field records an absence of assessment. For awards, independence is structural rather than assessed: the decision function is sealed from commercial information by design, which is a different claim from an unfounded default and may warrant different wording. Which correction each archive takes is part of the rule being written, and both will be applied under it, dated, through the corrections route.

Claims published as images are read by none of CFI.co’s checks, 1 August 2026

CFI.co verifies its published claims by searching text: the page body, and since 31 July the machine-readable structured data alongside it. Neither can read a claim rendered as a picture. Any factual claim CFI.co publishes as an image therefore passes every verification surface it operates without being examined.

That is the finding. What follows is the instance that exposed it.

Two families of promotional graphic, published under the names “CFI.co in figures” and “CFI.co in numbers”, rendered CFI.co’s own statistics as pixels across several generations of each. Fifty-one image files have been placed beyond public reach today, in addition to those restricted on 27 July.

Four kinds of figure in them required it. Print readership is stated as 142,128, as 152,128, as 162,128, as 174,000 and as 180,000, alongside the 128,000 withdrawn from CFI.co’s media-information page on 31 July. Online page views per month are stated as 60,000-plus, as 150,000-plus, and as 241,853. The size of CFI.co’s team is stated as 53 in one family and as 80 in the other. The number of countries CFI.co’s clients represent is stated as 107 in one family and as 109 in the other, where the site’s own code states 112 — the discrepancy registered as open and undecided on 31 July, now shown to run further than the text surfaces on which it was found. Every one of these kinds is internally inconsistent, and CFI.co is able to evidence none of them.

The graphics also stated a count of the companies held in CFI.co’s internal database. The publisher ruled on 27 July that nothing CFI.co publishes may state or imply the size, scope or existence of that database, and this entry accordingly discloses the figure’s presence without restating it.

No account is offered here of how any of these figures came to be published, or to differ from one another. CFI.co cannot establish it and does not assert it.

This is a restriction and not a removal. Nothing has been destroyed; the files and their contents are retained and can be produced.

What was then tested, and what it did not settle. A claim that a class of defect is closed is worth no more than the search behind it, so the search is stated. Every image on both CFI.co installs whose proportions match these graphics — the long horizontal strip and the tall column — was enumerated and the remainder examined. On the awards site the remainder is winner-company logos without exception. On the main site it is advertisers’ and institutions’ own creatives at standard advertising sizes, and three items of CFI.co’s own artwork — a row of icons, a coverage banner and a screenshot of the site’s own front page — none of which carries a figure. No third family exists, and the two named above are the whole of it.

That test closes the graphics, not the finding. It searches by shape, and a claim set in an ordinarily proportioned image is invisible to it. Two such were found by reading rather than by shape: a table of bank branch counts from 2014 and a table of franchise investment levels from 2026, both reproducing figures attributed to others inside articles rather than claims CFI.co makes about itself. They are recorded here as evidence that the search which closed the graphics would not have found them. CFI.co does not know how many claims published as images exist across fourteen years, and states the number as unknown rather than as none. Where one is identified and read, it will be recorded with what the image actually says.

A protection CFI.co said was in place was not, 1 August 2026

The README of CFI.co’s governance repository stated: “Force-pushes and branch deletions are blocked on main.” They were not. No branch protection was configured on that repository, and the sentence was untrue for the whole of its life — from 31 July 2026, when it was published, until it was made true on 1 August 2026.

The sentence sat in the paragraph that exists to invite checking rather than to ask for trust. It opens: “Rather than promise that a published version is never edited or removed, here is what would have to fail for that to happen without you noticing.” The reader was then told a safeguard was in place that was not. Of everything CFI.co published that day, this was the sentence a reader was most entitled to rely on, and it was the one that was wrong.

It was found during preparation for publishing the governance file, by opening the repository’s settings rather than by reading its text.

Why no check CFI.co runs would have caught it. The claim is about a configuration, not about a page. CFI.co verifies its published claims by searching text and, since 31 July, the machine-readable data alongside it. Neither can read a repository setting. The sentence was consistent with every other sentence around it, correctly spelled, and false, and nothing CFI.co operates was capable of noticing. This is the same defect as a claim rendered as an image, recorded separately: the medium a claim is made in determines whether any check can reach it, and CFI.co has now found two media its checks cannot read.

How it was corrected. By configuring the protection, so that the claim became true, rather than by removing or softening the sentence. The claim was the right one to make; it had not been backed. Force pushes are now blocked and deletions restricted on main. A reader who wants to test the corrected version can attempt exactly what the sentence describes.

CFI.co does not assert how the gap arose. What can be established is that the claim was published on 31 July and that the setting was absent when checked on 1 August; whether the protection was ever configured and later removed cannot be determined from the repository’s own history, and is not asserted either way.

One consequence is recorded because it bears on the value of every other disclosure. The governance file names this repository as the address at which its published versions and their hashes can be verified. An adversarial review of the file’s text was under way when this was found, and it would not have found this, because the defect was not in the text — it was in the thing the text points at. Reviewing a document and reviewing the infrastructure it relies on are two pieces of work, and CFI.co had been treating them as one.

This register was first published 31 July 2026. It will be added to as further items are found; existing entries are corrected in place with the correction dated, never removed.