Australia's most- and least-trusted brands revealed

Australians have relaxed their mistrust of Woolworths – slightly – propelling a new brand to Australia’s least-trusted.

And people are becoming more suspicious of AI companies, as they continue to slide down the rankings.

Roy Morgan’s December 2025 quarter brand trust research showed Woolworths and Coles had both climbed a little in the national esteem in the past quarter, with Woolworths going from our least-trusted to fourth-least, and Coles going from fourth- to fifth-least.

“Above” them on the distrust scale are three new movers, with telco giant Optus named the country’s least-trusted brand for the first time since September 2024.

In second spot is Meta/Facebook, followed by Temu.

Then come the big two supermarkets, followed by Tesla, Qantas, Telstra, Shein, and X.

Optus’s further loss of trust follows a network outage in September 2025, which was linked to a fatality after a caller could not contact Triple Zero.

At the other end of the scale, Bunnings retained its spot as king of Australia’s brands, remaining the nation’s most trusted for the 10th consecutive quarter.

Fellow stayers Aldi and Kmart also remained solidly entrenched at second and third, respectively.

The rest of the top 10 remained consistent, rounded out by Commonwealth Bank (4th), Apple (5th), Big W (6th), Myer (7th), Toyota (8th), JB Hi-Fi (9th) and Australia Post (10th).

The only movement there was between Myer and Toyota, which moved one spot up and one spot down, respectively.

Outside the top and bottom 10, broader trends were evident.

“The broader overall industry rankings show the retail industry as the most trusted industry ahead of the consumer products industry as the top two ranked industries for a third straight quarter,” Roy Morgan chief executive Michele Levine said.

The banking industry also continued to recover, she said, up to third spot – an improvement of 15 places from nine months ago.

The supermarket and convenience stores industry has also regained “net trust”, rising nine places in the most recent quarter, Levine said.

“At the other end of the scale, the telecommunications industry is the most distrusted for a second straight quarter in the 12 months to March 2026 – driven by Optus returning to a position it has held before as the most distrusted brand in Australia for the first time since September 2024,” she said.

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“The second most distrusted industry is again video sharing services/social media industry driven by the high distrust for brands like Facebook/Meta, X/Twitter, and TikTok (14th most distrusted brand),” Levine said.

“Sliding into the bottom three industries is the mining and petroleum industry with oil major BP now one of the Top 20 most distrusted brands in the country in 20th place overall.”

Levine said three companies leading the AI charge were also the focus of rising distrust, including Google, OpenAI, and ChatGPT.

“Significantly, Open AI deteriorated seven places to enter the top 20 most distrusted brands for the first time in 19th position driven by suspicions around the profit motives and ethics of the firm headed by controversial CEO Sam Altman,” she said.

“Google’s net distrust worsened two places to be the 15th most distrusted brand in Australia.”