Optus remains Australia's most distrusted brand a year after its Triple Zero outage, and the top five is unchanged: Facebook/Meta, Temu, Woolworths and Coles follow. Telstra rose two places to sixth even before its July outage. Tesla and Qantas are the improvers, Qantas by three places. Beyond the top ten, the AI story is the one to watch: OpenAI is now the 16th most distrusted brand in the country, down ten positions in two quarters, and Palantir has entered the top 30. Roy Morgan's read is that distrust no longer needs familiarity or a scandal; it travels digitally.
Why it matters for marketers
Five of the ten most distrusted brands are among the biggest advertisers in the country. Distrust at this level is a media-efficiency problem before it is a reputation problem: every dollar of reach lands on an audience that has already decided. The OpenAI trend matters for anyone building on ChatGPT, since 10.5 million Australians use a product they do not trust.
Method and source
Roy Morgan's Risk Monitor interviews around 1,500 to 2,000 Australians a month and asks, unprompted, which brands they trust and distrust and why, across roughly 1,000 brands in 27 sectors. Rankings are a 12-month rolling average; this edition runs to June 2026 (n=17,704) and was published on 24 August 2026. Movement is the change in position since the March 2026 quarter. Source: Roy Morgan, finding 10327.
