ERM’s Rate the Raters series has long been a useful temperature check on the ESG ratings market. We compared the two latest editions to see how sentiments are changing for companies and investors.
In the 2025 edition, companies said they trusted ratings more than they had two years earlier (3.12 out of 5, up from 2.86). A year later, investors said the opposite. Their trust slipped from 3.31 to 3.05, they scored most raters lower than companies had, and many told ERM they care more about the data behind a rating than the rating itself.
Note: The 2025 report surveyed companies and the 2026 report surveyed investors, so this isn’t a straight year-on-year comparison. It’s closer to hearing both sides of the same market.
About the report
Rate the Raters is run by the ERM Sustainability Institute and is now on its sixth edition. Each round asks people who use or respond to ESG ratings to score the main providers on quality and usefulness, and to say how far they trust ratings overall. It also covers why they use ratings, how many providers they deal with and what they expect to change.
ERM now alternates between companies and investors, and wrote the 2026 report as a companion to the 2025 one.
| Edition | Audience | Sample | Fieldwork | Compared with |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 Corporate Edition | Sustainability professionals at companies | 386 responses (206 complete) from 39 countries and 28 sectors, plus interviews and a roundtable with 34 professionals | May–July 2025 | 2023 corporate survey |
| 2026 Investor Edition, “Beyond the score” | Investment professionals: asset managers (40%), asset owners (22%), private equity (18%), banks (14%) | 53 respondents managing about $23.5 trillion, plus 10 interviews; 49% EMEA, 29% APAC, 20% North America | February–July 2026 | 2023 investor survey (33 respondents) |
Most of the same providers appear in both, among them MSCI, S&P Global ESG, CDP, EcoVadis, Sustainalytics, ISS, RepRisk, Bloomberg, FTSE4Good and LSEG. Moody’s ESG is no longer scored, since it stopped producing its own ratings and partnered with MSCI.
What companies said in 2025
S&P Global ESG came top for quality, with CDP and EcoVadis behind it. EcoVadis saw the biggest jump on usefulness moving from seventh in 2023 to first. As one respondent put it, its value “comes from the data it provides, not just the score.”
| Why companies engage with raters | 2023 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Investor demand as top reason | 57% | 46% |
| Customer demand as top reason | 7% | 23% |
| Share reporting low trust in ratings | 31% | 19% |
The reasons companies engage are shifting too. Investor demand is still the main driver, but customer pressure has more than tripled as a top reason, which goes some way to explaining EcoVadis’s rise.
Companies are also getting choosier. The number working with more than ten raters fell by more than half, and most now deal with three to five. 84% of companies plan to keep engaging with ratings and 64% expect investor interest to hold up, even if 46% think ratings will matter less over time.
A few other results stood out. Regulation appeared for the first time as a reason to engage, ranking fifth, and only 10% said they don’t use ratings to help prepare for compliance. Closer alignment with ESRS and ISSB was the change companies wanted most. Companies were wary of AI, with just 14% calling a rater’s use of it important. North American respondents were the toughest markers, scoring quality at 2.94 against 3.29 in APAC.
What should companies do: Pick raters based on who actually uses them, treat questionnaires as a management tool, check your data during review windows, and tell raters what isn’t working.
What investors said in 2026
Investors came back noticeably tougher than in 2023. The highest quality score any rater received dropped from 4.20 to 3.50, and average trust fell from 3.31 to 3.05. Ratings are still part of the toolkit, but for most investors they’re now one input among several.
MSCI comes out on top
MSCI ranked first on both quality (3.50) and usefulness (3.58), up from seventh and fifth in 2023. It was also the provider investors knew best, with 74% of respondents scoring it. CDP (3.45) and EcoVadis (3.41) came next on quality, while EcoVadis (3.53) and RepRisk (3.36) followed on usefulness.
On quality, investors and companies broadly agree. MSCI, CDP, EcoVadis, ISS and S&P Global ESG are in both groups’ top six. Usefulness is where they part ways. S&P Global ESG, the companies’ favourite on quality, is only sixth for investors on usefulness, while RepRisk, which tracks controversies, climbed seven places to third.
Companies trust ratings more, investors less
Half of investors scored their trust at 3 out of 5. ERM puts the decline down to data quality problems, reporting errors, slow updates and frustration over pricing. A UK asset owner summed up the timing issue: “By the time that raters upload the data, it is quite lagged.”
Investors have moved past the headline score
This is probably the most significant result. In 2023, ESG ratings tied for first place as investors’ most useful source of ESG information. In 2026 they came sixth, behind in-house research, direct engagement with companies and sustainability reports. Investors still find the underlying data more useful than the score, though both lost ground.
They’re using ratings less often, too. 58% still use them at least once a week, but 18% say they never use them at all, mostly private equity and venture capital firms. In 2023 that figure was zero.
Other changes worth knowing about
Investors are trimming their subscriptions. Most work with one to five providers, and they complained about overlapping data, high costs and vendor lock-in. Several are adding smaller specialists such as Clarity AI, Auquan and Planetrics for climate, nature and human rights data.
What makes a rating credible hasn’t changed much. Methodology disclosure (93%), methodology quality (91%) and credible data sources (87%) still top the list. In interviews, though, investors kept coming back to a basic requirement: if the data doesn’t load easily into their own systems, they won’t use it.
Looking ahead, investors most want ratings to focus on material issues and show clearer links to financial performance. They also plan to lean on AI themselves, with 66% expecting to use it to check data quality and 61% to automate data collection. Only 14% care whether the raters use AI.
Regulation Impact. The EU ESG Ratings Regulation took effect on 2 July 2026 and puts raters under ESMA supervision. Providers are already adjusting. MSCI’s 2026 model update changed ratings for about 37% of issuers, and CDP is bringing its 2027 scoring deadline forward from September to June.
For all the criticism, investors are more upbeat than companies about the future. Only 33% expect ratings to become less relevant, compared with 46% of companies.
What this means for companies
The thread running through both reports is that the data behind a rating now counts for more than the rating. Investors read company disclosures and rater data and draw their own conclusions. Companies should improve public disclosure overall, focus on the raters that matter and get sustainability and investor relations working together.
Some summary actions for companies:
- Choose raters based on who uses them. Investors buy data from MSCI, Bloomberg and Sustainalytics most often and score MSCI, CDP, EcoVadis and RepRisk highest. Customers and supply chains tend to rely on EcoVadis and CDP. If no stakeholder looks at a rating, consider dropping it.
- Make your raw data easy to use. Sustainability reports are now investors’ third most useful source (40%). Publish emissions, board, workforce and incident data in a clear, machine-readable format, aligned to ISSB, ESRS or the UK standards.
- Check what raters hold on you. Use review windows to correct mistakes. Errors and out-of-date data are the main reasons investor trust has fallen.
- Deal with controversies quickly and in public. RepRisk’s rise and investors’ growing use of AI monitoring mean incidents get picked up fast.
- Bring IR into the conversation. Direct engagement is investors’ second most useful source (50%), so your IR team needs to be able to talk through ratings, results and controversies, and know when to call in a specialist.
- Frame disclosures around materiality. It’s what investors most want raters to focus on, so it’s worth leading with it yourself.
- Expect methodologies to keep moving. Between the EU rules, MSCI’s model update and CDP’s earlier 2027 timeline, what raters ask for and when will keep changing. Build time into each cycle to re-map your responses.
Final thoughts
ESG ratings still matter. They’re just being used differently. Companies trust them more and are working with fewer of them, while investors trust them less and are pulling out the data to run their own analysis. Either way, the companies that publish clean, comparable, standards-aligned data are in the best position, whatever their headline scores say.
Sources
- ERM Sustainability Institute, Rate the Raters 2025: ESG Ratings in Evolution (Corporate Edition)
- ERM Sustainability Institute, Rate the Raters 2026: Beyond the score – Investor views on ESG ratings (October 2026)
- ERM Sustainability Institute, Rate the Raters series page
Cover and charts by Nossa Data, using figures from the two ERM reports.
