When’s the Last Time You Googled Your Stock? CDP Scores Added to Google’s Market Summary
Have you googled your stock recently? Google search results for some stocks will now include a line item for a company’s CDP score alongside traditional financial metrics like market capitalization and price-to-earnings ratio. Though the search results do not specify, the score listed is based on the company’s climate change questionnaire response. CDP also has questionnaires and scores for forests and water security.
Let’s look at Comcast as an example. If you google “Comcast Stock”, “CMCSA”, “Comcast Stock Price”, or a similar variation, the below image comes up above all other search results.
Further, if you hover over “CDP score”, a description pops up saying, “A measure of the actions a company takes to address climate change.” Then, two links with more information are also accessible from the popup window.
- View Score Details – brings a viewer to the company’s response page on the CDP website. This page shows all the questionnaires the company has responded to in recent years and reveals the scores for the corresponding responses, when available.
- About CDP scores – takes a viewer to the CDP website, specifically to the about page, which starts with “The A List 2021”. This list includes the companies that received a score of an “A” on the climate change, forest, or water security questionnaires from the 2021 responses. If the viewer scrolls down on the page, then it will see more information on CDP and its scores.
From our research, your stock’s metrics listed on Google’s Market Summary may not include CDP scores if your company:
- Has not submitted a CDP climate change questionnaire
- Has only submitted its first CDP climate change questionnaire and the survey response is not yet publicly available
Notably, if a company is sent a request to submit a response to the CDP questionnaire and declines to respond, then it receives a CDP score of an “F”. Interestingly, Google seems to have chosen not to show the CDP score for companies with an “F”. While the low score is due to a lack of information, Google is not revealing all scores from CDP in its search function. Additionally, not every score is accurately reflected on Google. A few companies who did in fact receive an “F” showed incorrect scores on Google’s Market Summary.
By displaying CDP scores in the Market Summary snapshot, Google is making CDP scores easily accessible to anyone who uses Google’s search engine when looking up stock information. While CDP climate change scores are telling about a company’s environmental impact, it is limited to the “E” pillar and does not cover social or governance themes, topics that are commonly included when evaluating a company’s ESG performance.
Similarly, Yahoo Finance provides ESG data to anyone who looks up a stock on the site. Under the “Sustainability” tab, you can see Sustainalytics’ ESG Risk Ratings. It displays the Total ESG Risk score, Environmental Risk score, Social Risk score, Governance Risk score, and Controversy level – common data points that Sustainalytics provides on corporate issuers.
Google and Yahoo are of the few outlets to also display ESG metrics. Other outlets such as Seeking Alpha, Benzinga, CNN Money, Market Watch, Wall Street Journal, Nasdaq, Robinhood, and Apple’s Stocks app do not currently have any ESG data included in stock profiles.
To stay ahead of questions or potential concerns, it is important to understand what ESG ratings information is available for your company. While institutional investors may be looking at a variety of data points, broader stakeholder groups may be seeing the scores that are free and most easily accessible.
By using ESG Infinite, you can identify gaps within your current ESG reporting and use our library of best practices to develop high-scoring policies and disclosures. If you’d like to learn how to improve your ESG scores, contact us.