A single screenshot pulled 2.4 million views this week, and it said more about Alphabet than any diversity report the company has ever published.
On July 29, X user Katie Miller posted side-by-side Google AI Overview results for two nearly identical questions about race and doctor preference. According to her screenshots, the AI summary called one racial preference ethically unacceptable and rooted in bias — and called the same preference, with the race swapped, valid and reasonable. Elon Musk replied publicly, calling the asymmetry something Sundar Pichai needed to answer for. The post drew 64,700 likes and 10,800 reposts in roughly 24 hours.
Google's response, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable, was that the AI Overview had been "picking up particular web pages for this specific search," that the behavior did not appear for all queries, and that its teams were looking into it. Take that explanation at face value if you want to. It does not move the number on our scoreboard.
Alphabet Inc. scores 80/100 on the BuyWokeFree index — extremely woke. And the most useful thing about this week is that it shows exactly why that score did not fall when Google's DEI headlines did.
Google scrapped its hiring targets. The score barely moved.
This is not a case of a company that never retreated. In February 2025, Alphabet chief people officer Fiona Cicconi told staff that the company had set "aspirational hiring goals" in 2020 and that "in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals." Alphabet also dropped from its annual SEC filing the line committing to make diversity, equity and inclusion "part of everything we do" — language that had appeared in its reports from 2021 through 2024. The company pointed to its status as a federal contractor and to executive orders and court decisions it was evaluating.
Real retreat, publicly documented. So why is Alphabet still an 80?
Because a hiring memo touches one of six things we measure. Our score covers ESG reporting, DEI programs, Pride sponsorships, the HRC Corporate Equality Index, political contributions, and CEO Action for Diversity participation. Alphabet still carries continuous ESG reporting, roughly $4 million in LGBTQ+ support, perfect CEI scores, and $20.6 million in political contributions with about 80% going to Democrats. Killing a recruiting target does not touch the checkbook, the index rating, or the reporting apparatus. Five of six dimensions survived the memo intact.
That is the entire thesis of a scoring database. A press release is one data point. A score is six.
The receipt nobody put on a poster: 40%
Here is the number that deserved more attention than any of it. According to Spencer Stuart, of the 364 new independent directors named to S&P 500 boards in the year ended April 30, just 40% were women or racial minorities — the lowest share since 2014, when the figure was 39%. That is down from a peak of 72% in 2021 and 2022.
But read the second number alongside it: diverse directors still hold 49.3% of all S&P 500 board seats, barely off the record 49.6% set in 2024 and 2025.
The flow reversed. The stock did not. Corporate America stopped adding, but it did not unwind a thing — which is the same shape as the Google story. The public-facing commitment got quieter. The machinery stayed exactly where it was. Anyone telling you the DEI era ended in 2025 is reading the press releases and not the proxy statements.
The Big Tech scoreboard
If the search layer is going to editorialize, it is worth knowing who owns the search layer. Here is where the major technology brands land on our index:
- Apple — 100/100. A perfect score, and the least apologetic of the group. On February 25, 2025, more than 97% of voting shareholders rejected a National Center for Public Policy Research proposal to end Apple's DEI programs, with leadership recommending a vote against it. Apple defended the programs as integral to its culture.
- Microsoft — 100/100. A Global Diversity & Inclusion division, Pride campaigns, a perfect CEI score, more than $25 million in political spending, and a CEO Action signature. It has trimmed some programs while citing legal risk; the structure is intact.
- Amazon — 100/100. The company said it was winding down "outdated programs and materials" in an internal review, but scores at the maximum across all six of our dimensions.
- Alphabet — 80/100. Hiring goals gone, 10-K language gone, everything else standing.
- Meta Platforms — 55/100. The earliest mover of the majors, ending its equity and inclusion initiatives before the 2025 inauguration and citing a changing legal landscape. The reversal earned real credit; the ESG reporting and perfect CEI history keep it from going lower.
- OpenAI — 28/100. The lowest-scoring major AI company we track. It scrubbed its "Commitment to DEI" page in early 2025 and has kept that language off its site and careers pages since.
Note the spread: 100 to 28 inside a single industry. There is no such thing as "tech is all the same." There is only a range that nobody bothered to measure until now. The full list lives on our Non-Woke Technology Brands and AI and Machine Learning pages.
The next fight is not the HR page. It is the model.
For a decade, corporate ideology lived somewhere you could see it: a careers page, a Pride float, a sustainability PDF. Every one of those is a thing a company can delete in an afternoon when the political weather changes — and in 2025, dozens of them did exactly that.
A model is different. It is trained, weighted, and shipped inside a product that 90% of the country uses without thinking about it. Nobody votes on it at an annual meeting. There is no proxy statement line item for it. When an AI summary answers the same question two different ways depending on which race you type, that is not a policy you can boycott — it is a default you have to notice first.
Which is why the screenshot beat the rollback. Deleting a diversity target is visible and reversible. Whatever produced those two answers is neither.
What to do with the number
You now have something you did not have two years ago: a choice at the assistant layer. Alphabet sits at 80. OpenAI sits at 28. That is a 52-point gap between the two products most Americans are about to ask their questions to, and it is the first time this comparison has been possible with actual numbers behind it.
Check the score before you commit the household to an ecosystem. Devices, search, cloud storage, and smart speakers are sticky in a way a razor brand never was — switching a search engine takes a minute, switching an entire platform takes a year. Look up Apple at 100 before the next phone upgrade, not after.
And keep the 40% in your pocket. The next time someone tells you corporate America surrendered on DEI, remind them that the boardrooms are still 49.3% diverse and the only thing that actually changed is the rate of new arrivals. The retreat is real. It is also much smaller than the headlines about it.