The world's most reputable companies
2026 Global RepTrak® 100
Access this year's full rankings by downloading the report now.
Reputation is now multiplayer.
For years, the job in Corporate Communications has been to manage reputation by employing top-down, corporate-heavy stories: Media relations, investor relations, press releases.
That is changing.
Reputation is now co-constructed by communities, employees, creators, cultural participants, and, increasingly, AI systems. The very stakeholders Corporate Communications has spent years looking to influence are now doing the influencing.
For over two decades, RepTrak has measured the world's most reputable companies through a "think, feel, do" framework — linking drivers like Products & Services, Innovation, Workplace, Conduct, Citizenship, Leadership, and Performance to emotional connection and measurable Business Outcomes. Our model also tracks how channels shape reputation across earned, owned, paid media, and direct experience, using reach and impact to show which channels are helping or hurting perceptions.
There's been very little change in channel impact for roughly the last ten years. But that is changing.
While Reputation Scores are near all-time highs, the infrastructure that builds corporate reputation is being rewired. Every traditional information channel lost effectiveness in 2026, dropping to all-time lows across all 12 micro touchpoints we measure.
But this isn't an overnight development for corporate communications: It's the continuation of a trend that has been building for years, and the top-ranked companies in our report have all leaned into this trend earlier than their peers.
The LEGO Group, perhaps one of the biggest co-construction brands of all time, again leads our list. Adidas, a company that has leaned into user-generated content and collaborations in a way many of its competitors haven't, is now back in the top 10 (at number 2).
What you're seeing in these rankings is a strategy shift that hints at the future of corporate communications at a time that a new channel is emerging: AI.
For the first time in our dataset, artificial intelligence was included as a channel. And it didn't arrive gradually. Despite ranking 11th out of 14 channels in reach, it already ranks 7th in impact — ahead of email, social media, traditional advertising, and news media.
So, the companies thriving aren't the ones broadcasting loudest; they're the ones who are providing a clear, consistent message for everyone to shape in their own voice, and often staying out of the way while that happens.
This is the multiplayer experience: A willingness to let everyone shape your narrative.
Those adopting this approach are able to do this because they are also executing on the fundamentals. At a time when we see traditional players like Disney (down out of the rankings entirely after being as high as 2 in 2020) and Harley Davidson (down 37 places to 41 after 5 straight years in the top 10) dropping because of value pressures, performance issues and leadership credibility, the anecdotes are compelling: A willingness to give your community control of your corporate narrative can elevate your reputation. But you do need to have something worth elevating first.
This report shows quantitatively through RepTrak data and anecdotally through case studies how this new approach to corporate communications is taking shape.
For over two decades, RepTrak has delivered quantifiable insights on corporate reputation. Our methodology is built on a single conviction: the only measure of reputation that matters is the one formed by real people, not executives, not algorithms, not self-reporting. We go straight to the source.
The 2026 Global RepTrak 100 is based on responses collected globally across 14 major economies at the end of 2025. We call our respondents the informed general public (IGP), individuals who are not just aware of a company but have formed an opinion about it. A diverse, census-balanced sample, collected by partnering with industry leader Dynata, ensures that responses are equally represented across regions, accounting for cultural nuance while maintaining consistency over time.
With a reach that encompasses 70 million consumers and business professionals globally, and an extensive library of individual profile attributes collected through surveys, Dynata is RepTrak's partner of choice for a study of this scale. The company has built innovative data services and solutions around its robust first-party data offering to bring the voice of the customer to the entire marketing continuum — from uncovering insights to activating campaigns and measuring cross-channel marketing return on investment.
Our proprietary reputation model is organized around three dimensions: Feel, Think, and Do. Together they form the complete picture of how a company's reputation operates: what drives it, how strong it is, and what it produces:
Feel captures the emotional dimension, the degree of esteem, admiration, trust, and positive regard stakeholders hold toward a company. The Reputation Score is the primary Feel metric: a single number from 0–100 that reflects the overall strength of the emotional connection the informed general public has with a company. It is the output of everything a company does and everything stakeholders say about what it does.
Think captures the rational dimension, what stakeholders believe about a company across seven Drivers of Reputation: Products & Services, Performance, Innovation, Leadership, Conduct, Citizenship, and Workplace. Each driver is composed of underlying factors that describe specific, measurable attributes. Think scores explain why people feel the way they do.
Do captures the behavioral dimension, the actions stakeholders are willing to take on behalf of a company. RepTrak measures seven Business Outcomes: Buy, Recommend Products, Say Positive, Trust to Do the Right Thing, Work For, Invest, and Benefit of the Doubt. These are the behaviors that translate reputation into commercial and institutional value. Strong Feel scores produce strong Do scores; weak Feel undermines all of them.
One methodological note on channels: for the first time in 2026, our channel reach and impact data includes generative AI as a discrete touchpoint — measured alongside the 13 traditional micro touchpoints that have defined our channel landscape reporting for the last 10 years. This addition reflects the rapid emergence of AI as a source through which stakeholders are actively forming opinions about companies. All channel data in this report reflects 2026 measurements unless otherwise noted.
While companies are still the architects of their reputation inputs, they are not the final shapers. The multiplayer reality means the very people forming opinions are also shaping the last-mile narratives that influence them.
The 2026 channel data puts numbers on it: Impact, the gap in Reputation Score between stakeholders who were exposed to a channel and those who were not, is at its lowest recorded level across every channel. On the surface, this looks like a system in decline.
But when you separate the two components that comprise the Impact, the story changes: The exposed score has not fallen. Across almost every touchpoint, it has been flat to rising since 2017. The people who are being reached by each channel today are forming at least as strong an opinion as they ever did, and in most cases stronger.
What has moved, however, is the non-exposed score.
The average Reputation Score among stakeholders who were not reached by a given channel has risen by 2 to 4 points across nearly every touchpoint since 2017. The floor is rising, the ceiling is holding, and the gap is narrowing.
Why the Floor Is Rising
The non-exposed score for any channel is not a measurement of people untouched by all channels; it is a measurement of people reached by other channels instead. Reach has fallen in each individual channel, creating audiences that are more concentrated and more inclined to both receive the narratives within that channel and help shape it.
When those people form a strong view through their preferred channel, it travels with them into every other interaction, raising the non-exposed baseline across channels they were never directly reached through. The channels are nodes in a network, and what moves through one raises the floor in all the others.
This is the co-authorship effect made visible in the data. The people who show up in a channel are not passive recipients of a company's message; they carry their interpretation outward into every other interaction. The company provides the raw material. The community authors the narrative.
None of this is new. The IGP has always had choices about where to consume information; what has changed is the scale of those choices. Two decades of channel proliferation have forced increasingly active decisions about where to spend attention. And now a new one is emerging.
AI, and the Arrival of a New Channel
Generative AI is the latest development in that proliferation, but a wholly different kind of channel than any that came before it. Where every other channel delivers content the IGP encounters passively or by habit, AI delivers answers to questions the IGP actively asked. It is not passively consumed. It is actively sought.
AI reaches 10% of stakeholders, ranking 11th out of 14 channels by reach. But it ranks 7th by impact, with a score of 6.6 — ahead of traditional channels like email, social media news, customer support, billboard advertising, television and print advertising, news media, and influencers.
Its exposed score is 80.44 against a non-exposed score of 73.96. That 6.5-point gap is the largest of any channel except direct experience.
The profile of the AI audience is exactly what the self-selection pattern predicts for a high-impact, lower-reach channel. They arrive with a question and leave with a synthesized answer drawn from everything that has ever been said about that company: inputs from employees, customers, journalists, communities, and every other stakeholder across every other channel.
As much as the question for companies is how to perform well on AI, it is also whether the network of stakeholders who talk about you is saying something worth amplifying.
The sections that follow trace this dynamic through the drivers, scores, and business outcomes that define the 2026 data. The thread is consistent throughout: reputation built on authentic stakeholder alignment is gaining ground. Reputation built on channel-mediated narrative control is losing it.
Reputation Score is the emotional dimension of RepTrak's model, scoring the degree to which stakeholders feel esteem, admiration, trust, and positive regard toward a company. In 2026 it rose modestly to 74.6, marking the third straight year of growth.
A 0.1-point gain in the context of sustained geopolitical disruption, US trade policy shifts, and accelerating news cycles is not nothing. The companies in this dataset have, in aggregate, continued to earn slightly more trust than they lose.
The country data is where the score tells its most specific story. The UK gained 2.9 points, the largest single-market movement in the dataset. Australia, South Korea, and Germany all rose. China fell 1.0 point, and India had the sharpest single-market decline, falling 2.4 points. The US fell .3 points.
The seven RepTrak Drivers of Reputation measure what stakeholders think about a company, and, in 2026, nearly all drivers rose.
Products & Services fell .1 points to 76 (its first decline after consecutive years of gains), primarily due to a drop in the "High Quality Products and Services" factor score (down .4 to 77.8).
Along with that drop, the Profitable factor dropped .4 to 77.8, meaning the two highest-ranking factors fell while 19 of the other 21 factors rose.
Against this, every other driver rose. Innovation gained 0.5 points, Leadership rose 0.2, and Conduct gained .6. Workplace and Citizenship also moved significantly (.6 and .7, respectively).
This maps directly onto the channel dynamic. Products & Services and Performance are the drivers most legible through direct experience. The fastest rising drivers, like Conduct, Citizenship, Workplace, can be built through what employees, communities, and earned media say, not through campaigns.
The Do dimension captures what stakeholders are willing to do on behalf of a company. It measures where a stakeholder is willing to buy a company's products, recommend it, trust it, invest in it, or give it the benefit of the doubt.
In 2026 the data shows a split:
Stakeholders are becoming more selective about immediate transactions and more willing to commit to companies they believe in over the long term. Reputation is bifurcating into trust you act on today and trust you build toward tomorrow.
The ambassador data reinforces the split. Buy and Recommend Products both fell one full percentage point to 50.5 and 49.5%, respectively. Invest, meanwhile, rose 1 percentage point to 41%.
The LEGO Group leads the overall ambassador table at 50.7%, followed by NVIDIA on debut at 50.2% and Samsung at 49.4%. At the bottom, Novo Nordisk (−4 pp) and Google (−3 pp) experienced the sharpest declines.
It is what the multiplayer dynamic produces when it works: a community that carries the narrative also provides the buffer when the narrative is tested.
Beneath the headline of reputational growth, something fundamental has changed in how reputation is built, where it lives, and who holds it. The data this year tells the same story from every angle: reputation no longer belongs to the companies that invest most in communicating it. It belongs to the communities that choose to carry it.
Channel data shows impact compressing and driver data shows the same: the factors rising fastest are the ones stakeholders assess through observation and community signal, not through corporate communication.
Against this background, Generative AI has made its mark.
The companies in this report that are gaining ground have, in different ways, accepted this reality and organized around it. They have given stakeholder communities something genuine to carry: products worth advocating for, values visible in behavior, cultures that employees describe honestly and favorably in the channels they chose.
RepTrak has measured reputation for over two decades. The architecture of what drives it has not changed, because human trust has not changed. But the environment in which trust is formed has. Stakeholders now have more channels, more choices, more access to each other's opinions, and an AI that synthesizes all of it on demand. In that environment, the companies that build genuine stakeholder alignment are more advantaged than they have ever been.
The ranking awaits
2026 Global RepTrak 100
The Global RepTrak 100 report provides a definitive ranking of the world's most reputable companies and a comprehensive analysis of the global reputation landscape. Download now for access to:
- A list of the 100 most reputable companies in the world
- Case studies on three companies in our dataset
- Insights on how reputation gets shaped is changing
- AI's impact on the Informed General Public
- and more
For over a decade, we have leveraged our unparalleled data suite to understand global corporate trends and corresponding public sentiment year over year. Download the industry's most thorough annual report on reputation now.
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