Forbes was on a steadfast yet cautious mission: to methodically and with statistical rigor pursue just what it means for a company to be “trusted.” Born out of conversations with Forbes editor Alan Schwarz and Shann Biglione, SVP of Intelligence & Corporate Strategy at Signal AI, the project immediately raised some vital and difficult questions.
How can you measure trust in a corporation based on hard data and facts, not simply opinions? How do people demonstrate trust in a company’s actions?
By assembling a group of industry-leading data partners, Forbes created and officially launched its inaugural Most Trusted Companies in America list as well as its Best Companies in 2026.
Here we’ll explore the behind-the-scenes of how the lists came to be.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/25myalUNcAmqgSRiL77qzn?si=56a713f19e8d441a
Trustworthy vs. Trusted: Noting the difference
In conversation with Dan Gaynor and Shann Biglione on Signal in the Noise, Schwarz very much wanted to stress this point—‘trusted’ and trustworthy’ are two separate things. “Trustworthy” implies whom Forbes trusts and encourages others to trust; however, “Trusted” measures through hard data the trust shown by consumers, employees, investors, and media reports.
“The ingredients of the soup”: What makes up the ranking?
“ All of these things that get rated, we get them together in one soup, handle the data appropriately, have a certain weighting system and algorithms to make sense of the data, and then come up with something rooted in fact, not just our opinion.” - Alan Schwarz, Forbes
So, what pixels form the larger picture? What data points can be used to calculate and measure something like trust? How should different data points be weighted? How can you ensure the data is high-quality?
This led Schwarz to partner with multiple companies to quantify how trust is manifested across these pillars:
- Media Perception (Signal AI): with sentiment scores from Signal AI, trust is measured by how much and how positively a company is discussed within the global media landscape.
- Consumer Sentiment (HundredX): With survey data from HundredX, one can evaluate consumer perception based on alignment with customer values, customer service, and customer experience.
- Employee Sentiment (Glassdoor): Workers rated their company in such categories as career opportunities, compensation and benefits, confidence in senior leadership, work-life balance, company culture and values, diversity and inclusion, company business outlook, whether they would recommend their company to a friend, CEO approval, and overall.
- Financial Performance (Forbes): One- and five-year metrics for stock price and revenue growth.
- Business Trajectory (Crunchbase): For both public and private companies, Crunchbase metrics that consider dozens of financial indicators such as funding, market share and movements, and company growth.
- Cybersecurity (SecurityScorecard): Network and application security, malware vulnerability, regularity of patches, robustness of cybersecurity departments, and hacker chatter about possible exploits.
- Workforce Diversity (Denominator): Representation at both executive and lower levels of the company of different groups, such as gender, race/ethnicity, age, education, disability and nationality. Also corporate policies and commitments.
- Sustainability (Morningstar): Robustness of climate governance, sustainability strategy, risk Management, and financial and competitive strength.
- Workforce Stability (People Data Labs): Each company’s workforce growth rate, churn rate and average C-suite tenure.
- Company Size (Data Axle): Each company’s number of U.S. employees.
The quality of the data was key. The comprehensive triangulation of these datasets helps to strip away the biases of so many ‘most popular’ rankings, which often focus too much on only one dimension of successful performance. Schwarz was adamant about ensuring that no self-serving company announcements, interviews, or press releases were used in this data, so there was a clear, unbiased view of performance.
Note that, unlike many “Best of” rankings, Forbes never charges any fee for a company to be considered for or make a list. In this case, all U.S.-headquartered public companies with at least 1,000 employees were automatically eligible.
Explore the full ranking here.
How can a company rank on a future list?
Improve performance well enough that customers, employees, investors, and the media recognize it, and then it shows up in the data.
There is no hack or quick fix for strong, sustained performance on all fronts; it must be noticed by a company’s various audiences. There is no way of gaming the system.
Shann Biglione put it best: “You don’t get to the top without solving real problems."
Looking ahead, how might this grow?
Schwarz says this version of the Most Trusted Companies “is just the 1.0."
He gladly welcomes critique for the continued evolution of later versions. He shared hopes for innovating further through the use of more subcategories, exploring different datasets and partnerships, and further refining the methodology.