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Each year, The Harris Poll and Axios ask tens of thousands of Americans a simple but consequential question: which companies have the best and the worst reputations in the country right now? The answers, drawn from a nationally representative sample of the American public, form the basis of the Axios Harris Poll 100 — the annual ranking that has set the standard for how corporate reputation is measured and understood since 2019.
The 2026 rankings are out today. And the story they tell is worth reading carefully.
What Americans are saying this year
The mid-2020s are drawing comparisons to the mid-1970s — rising gas prices, affordability fatigue, and the implicit social contract between companies and the people they serve feels under strain to many Americans. Prices go up. Wages do not keep pace. The sense that work should be fulfilling has given way, for many, to simply holding on.
In that environment, the companies with the strongest reputations are the ones Americans feel are helping them get ahead.
What comes next
The Axios Harris Poll 100 is a snapshot: a precise and nationally representative read on where the American public stands on the companies most visible in daily life. But reputation does not move once a year. It moves continuously, shaped by everything a company does and says and is perceived to stand for.
The Harris Poll tracks reputation and brand health year-round, providing the kind of ongoing intelligence that turns an annual study into a living strategic asset.
If you want to understand what this year’s findings mean for your company, your category, or the landscape you are operating in, our team is ready to talk.
Methodology
The Axios Harris Poll 100 is a trusted ranking of the reputations of companies most on the minds of Americans, with a framework Harris has used since 1999. The survey findings are a result of a three-step process.
We first surveyed 6,226 Americans from a nationally representative online sample from December 15th to 22nd, 2025, to understand the public’s top-of-mind awareness of companies that either excel or falter in society. Respondents are asked which two companies — in their opinion — stand out as having the best reputation today and which two have the worst. All nominations are compiled into an aggregate list to determine the “most visible” companies. (Subsidiaries and brands are tallied within the parent company to create a total number of nominations for each company.)
Once we have a list of the 100 most-visible companies in America, we then deployed a second online survey to analyze those companies further. The second survey of 18,523 Americans from a nationally representative sample ran from February 13th to March 3rd, 2026. Respondents are first asked which of the 100 most visible companies from the first survey they are familiar with. From there, respondents are asked to rate two of the 100 most visible companies that they say they are “very familiar or somewhat with” on six dimensions of reputation to calculate a Reputational Quotient, or RQ®, score for each. The RQ® score determines the ranking of each company in The Axios Harris Poll 100. Each company score is comprised of a statistically significant sample size of 325 respondents weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult public on key demographics.
Lastly, we asked a third and final set of respondents in a separate set of online surveys about contextual questions on topics related to companies and politics. The contextual findings were conducted online over two waves between April 9th to 11th and May 7th to 9th, 2026 among two nationally representative samples of 2,028 and 2,148 U.S. adults, respectively.
