The most famous brands and products

YouTube is the most famous brand in the world for August 2026, with a score of 65.2. Launched in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, it edges Facebook at 62.7 and Instagram at 59.9, so the three brands the world attends to most are all places where it posts video and photographs. WhatsApp, the messaging service, is sixth at 54, which makes four of the top six Meta or Google properties.

What breaks the run of platforms is not a rival company but two political bodies. The European Union, the union of 27 member states, is fourth at 56.1, and the United Nations, founded in 1945 to prevent another world war, is seventh at 52.2. Netflix, which began in 1997 as a DVD-by-mail service and scrapped late fees two years later, sits between them at fifth.

The hardware and software names cluster just below. Apple and Microsoft tie at 51.6, ChatGPT, released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022, is tenth at 51.5 after less than four years in existence, and LinkedIn is eleventh. Then the list turns industrial: Samsung Electronics, the Korean company that began as Samsung-Sanyo in 1969, Toyota, incorporated in Aichi in 1937, and BMW, which started in Munich building aircraft engines rather than cars. Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 under the name Cadabra, closes the fifteen at 50.

The engine measured 302 brands and organisations in the global scope. The spread from first to fifteenth is fifteen points, narrower than on the people lists, and every name in the group is something that billions of people touch in an ordinary week.