Rate the Raters 2026: Beyond the score

Are investors losing faith in ESG ratings, or simply using them differently?

Catherine Osborn, Katie Langemeier, and Aiste Brackley of the ERM Sustainability Institute examine how investors perceive and use ESG ratings in their report “Rate the Raters 2026: Beyond the score”.

They surveyed 53 investment professionals managing ~$23.5T in assets between February and July 2026, who scored providers on quality, usefulness and trust on 1 to 5 scales.

Results are compared with the 2023 investor and 2025 corporate editions. ValueCo supported participant outreach for this edition. Their main conclusions include:

• The average investor trust score fell from 3.31 in 2023 to 3.05 in 2026, and 25% of respondents now give a low score of 2, against none three years ago.
• Corporate ESG ratings fell from joint first to sixth among the most useful sources, chosen by 31% of respondents against 53% in 2023, behind in-house research (54%) and direct engagement (50%).
• 61.5% of investors use ratings as a basis for in-house research and 59% for company engagement, while only 28.2% collect top-level and sub-level scores to inform decisions.
• MSCI ranks first on both quality (3.50 out of 5) and usefulness (3.58), yet investors are more critical, as the highest quality score across providers fell from 4.20 in 2023.
• Investors keep their provider set small, with about 90% working with one to five raters, because of data overlap, subscription costs and vendor lock-in.
• Greater focus on material issues and better linkage to financial performance lead priorities for the next five years, and 65.9% expect to use AI to validate data quality.

This study shows investors are increasingly shifting from ESG scores to raw data, with growing interest in climate, nature and human rights.

The debate is moving from which rating is right to whether ratings are transparent, comparable and aligned with mandatory standards such as ESRS and ISSB, putting materiality at the centre.

For ESG rating providers now supervised by ESMA in Europe, methodology disclosure (rated highly important by 93% of investors) and credible data sources now matter more than brand.