Roy Morgan's latest risk monitor has Optus overtaking Woolworths as Australia's most distrusted brand, while OpenAI enters the top 20 distrusted brands for the first time. Trust is moving on the back of real events.
Distrust is earned in a single event and repaid over years. Optus is living proof.
Optus is now the most distrusted brand in Australia. Roy Morgan's latest risk monitor has the telco overtaking Woolworths for the top spot, the first time it has held the position in roughly a year and a half. The fall traces back to the fatal Triple Zero outage in September 2025, a reminder that for some businesses distrust is earned in a single event and repaid over years.
The rest of the distrusted list reads like a map of where Australians feel let down. Optus leads, followed by Facebook and Meta, then Temu, Woolworths and Coles. Woolworths actually improved this quarter, which shows trust can move in both directions when a brand puts the work in.
The new name is the one worth watching. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has entered the top 20 most distrusted brands for the first time, falling seven places into 19th. Roy Morgan ties the slide to suspicion about profit motives and the ethics of the company, not the quality of the product.
Why it matters
Trust is not a soft metric. It is the thing that decides whether your marketing lands or bounces. A distrusted brand pays more for every conversion because it has to overcome doubt before it can make a case. For Australian marketers, the OpenAI entry is the standout. The tools half the industry now runs on are made by a company a growing share of the public actively distrusts.
That has a flow-on effect. If you lean hard on AI in your customer-facing work, you are borrowing from a brand with a trust problem. The disclosure question is no longer abstract.
OpenAI's debut position on Australia's most distrusted brands list, driven by doubts over profit motives and ethics.
What to do about it
Know your own trust position before you assume it. Distrust shows up as higher acquisition costs and weaker word of mouth long before it shows up in a survey.
Treat trust as recoverable. Woolworths moved up this quarter. The path back is consistent behaviour over time, not a campaign.
Be deliberate about how you use AI in customer-facing work. The technology may be distrusted even where the output is good. Decide where disclosure helps you and where it hurts.
Watch the events, not just the rankings. Optus did not slide on messaging. It slid on an outage that cost lives. Operational failures are brand failures.
In a market where trust is this fragile, the brands that protect it carefully hold an advantage that no amount of media spend can buy back quickly.