Dawn is the most trusted brand in America for the second year in a row: report

Trust is sticky, like an adhesive bandage. But that gooey residue rubs right off with some soap.

Dawn Dish Soap held onto its place as the most trusted brand in America for the second year in a row after dethroning Band-Aid, which held the title from 2022 to 2024 but is now No. 2 in the rankings, according to Morning Consult’s annual Most Trusted Brands report.

The report is based on a series of surveys conducted from January 1 through May 15 of this year asking consumers how much they trust brands to “do what is right.”

The top two companies indicate a broader trend in the research, which found that many of the most trusted brands of 2026 are “household staples…that are reliable if not particularly exciting.” That could be a direct response to the rise of divisive AI brands, according to Nicholas Laughlin, Morning Consult’s VP of content.

“Lots of people are adopting AI, and there’s lots of positive feelings towards it, but there is also a good amount of negative sentiment,” Laughlin told Marketing Brew. “Trends are going back to these more back-to-basics, less technology-driven areas.”

With that said, Google came in at No. 3 on the list, an outlier in the tech category, which is generally seeing a “significant trust deficit,” according to Morning Consult.

“It’s one thing for a product brand like Band-Aid to be the most trusted,” Laughlin said. “Google manages a much more sprawling and complex brand that touches on some of the most complex issues of our day, in terms of things like AI.”

Google’s AI brand, Gemini, experienced one of the biggest rises in trust this year, per the report. Longer-lived Google products like Gmail and Google Maps also tend to score high trust ratings, he added, likely thanks to “positive, repeated interactions” with consumers over many years.

The rest of the top 10 most trusted brands are:

• Dove,
• PayPal,
• The Weather Channel,
• Heinz Ketchup,
• UPS,
• Hershey’s,
• And Kleenex.

On the rise: In addition to Gemini, a handful of other brands that were not among the overall top 10 nevertheless clocked notable YoY increases in net trust, including several “nostalgic favorites” like Mr. Pibb, Lunchables, Capri Sun, and Hot Wheels.

Laughlin chalked this group, which Morning Consult calls “trust risers,” up to being “the Y2K thing” as references to earlier eras continue to dominate the zeitgeist.

“It ties into…that broader nostalgia bucket, capitalizing on trends of things from the more analog era,” he said.

Other brands that increased their net trust significantly include:

• Hill’s Pet Nutrition, which was No. 2 on the list of trust risers, after Mr. Pibb;
• PetSmart at No. 4, following Lunchables;
• Poppi at No. 5;
• Gap at No. 13, having capitalized on culture by partnering with celebrities like KATSEYE and Young Miko;
• And Clif Bar, which has been getting back into sports marketing, at No. 22.

Holy smokes: Also not to be overlooked in the trust-risers category is cigarette brand Marlboro, which came in No. 6 on that list. Though its net trust sits at -8.2, that’s up 6.4 percentage points from last year, according to Morning Consult. Those gains were even larger among millennials (up 11.5 points to 6.9), people with annual incomes under $50,000 (up 10.9 points to -2.1), and women (up 9.7 points to -10.2).

The finding comes as cigarettes have been making a comeback in pop culture and Hollywood.

Touchdown: The NFL’s net trust overindexed among men, with a score of 46 points among that demo, 11 points higher than among all respondents. It’s the highest over-index brand among men, followed by Call of Duty, Cisco Systems, and Dos Equis. Dos Equis also made the list of the biggest trust risers for men.