Executive Reputation Score:
What Does Google Say About You?
Five questions about your digital presence — personal site, LinkedIn, media coverage, negative results, and your role — and you get a score out of 100 with a risk map and what others actually find when they search your name. Media mentions: Weber Shandwick — 83% of executives with highly-regarded CEOs cite positive media attention as a key benefit
Negative results penalty: Moz research — 1 negative result in branded search drives away ~22% of potential contacts before any interaction
Position weighting: Weber Shandwick — 44% of company market value and 45% of company reputation attributed to CEO reputation specifically
Score is a composite estimate across these sources, not a single named study.
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What This Calculator Measures, and Why It Matters
Executive reputation is one of those things that sounds soft until you look at the numbers. Weber Shandwick's survey of 1,700 senior executives found that 44% of a company's market value is directly attributed to CEO reputation — not product quality, not financials, not brand spend. The person at the top. That's a meaningful number to have sitting on a digital presence that nobody has actively managed.
This tool scores your personal online reputation across five factors that determine what a journalist, investor, due diligence analyst, or potential partner actually finds when they search your name. The CEO online reputation check isn't about vanity metrics — it's about whether the picture that appears for your name works for or against you before any meeting, call, or deal conversation begins.
The search happens before the meeting
Decision-makers search executive names before investing, partnering, hiring, or commissioning work. What they find — or don't find — shapes expectations before the first word is spoken. A thin or unprotected personal SERP is a risk that starts operating before you know a conversation is happening.
Absence is its own signal
61% of Fortune 500 CEOs had no social presence at all, per Weber Shandwick's 2010 baseline study. That number has shifted, but an executive with no personal website, a skeletal LinkedIn, and no media mentions still reads as a blank slate — and blank slates make stakeholders fill in the gaps with their own assumptions.
Negative results cost before any interaction
A single negative result on your personal search page drives away a meaningful share of people before they contact you. This loss is pre-meeting and invisible — no email, no call, no meeting booked. The damage shows up only as things that don't happen, not in any analytics dashboard.
The score tells you what to fix first
A personal brand risk assessment that returns "your reputation could be better" without saying what to do about it isn't useful. Each factor in this score has a specific impact and a specific fix — so the result tells you which move would add the most points, not just that the number is low.
What the Score Is Based On
Four named sources drive the five factors in this score. Each is traceable to a specific study with a published methodology — not an industry statistic recycled without a first source.CEO reputation drives nearly half of company value
Weber Shandwick and KRC Research surveyed 1,700+ senior executives across 19 countries. Respondents attributed an average of 44% of their company's market value directly to CEO reputation — and 45% of overall company reputation. 81% said external CEO engagement is now a mandate, not optional. This is the study's core finding and the reason CEO / Founder carries the highest position weight in the score.
Source: Weber Shandwick & KRC Research, The CEO Reputation Premium (1,700+ executives, 19 countries, 2015)Almost half of company reputation is directly attributable to the CEO
A separate study by Burson-Marsteller, based on 1,155 US chief executives, senior managers, financial analysts, institutional investors, business media, and government officials, found that 48% of company reputation can be attributed to the CEO — a rise of 20 percentage points from 40% in 1997. Business influencials were more likely to recommend a company as a good place to work (88%) if the CEO was favorably regarded.
Source: Burson-Marsteller, CEO Reputation study (1,155 respondents, US)LinkedIn is the primary due diligence channel for executives
87% of recruiters actively use LinkedIn for candidate sourcing. 43% of employers examine social media profiles during recruitment processes, and 36% have eliminated candidates based on what they found there. For executives specifically, LinkedIn is typically the first search result that appears for their name — making it the single most important controlled channel in personal digital presence.
Source: SHRM (2016), cited in PMC peer-reviewed study on digital footprint and recruitment decisionsNegative executive reputation filters talent before the pipeline starts
A CareerBuilder survey found that 71% of US workers won't apply to a company with negative public information about its leadership. This filtering happens before any contact is made — at the search result stage. The same mechanism applies to investors and partners who search executive names: a negative result narrows the funnel before any conversation begins.
Source: CareerBuilder survey, cited in Nadernejad Media executive reputation research roundup