Do Both Buyers and Bots Trust You?

The same trust signals now earn human referrals and AI recommendations.

Most of us have run a website through a free online grader at some point. We typed in the URL, waited for the spinner, and got back a page of red and yellow warnings about meta descriptions, schema markup, page speed, and the marketing best practices we apparently need.

Back in the day, I loved these. It felt productive. I could make easy changes on my site and raise my score, and then brag about it to my boss. However, it didn’t say much about whether a buyer would find us, like the page, or trust us enough to buy anything.

Today, thousands of graders are popping up to test your website for AI compatibility, and Share of Model checkers look to see if you are mentioned in AI responses. And for good reason.

Forrester’s 2026 survey of nearly 18,000 business buyers found that 94% used AI somewhere in their most recent purchase, and twice as many named AI or conversational search as their single most useful research source as named anything else.

But once again, there is another side of this coin that SEO experts are failing to consider.

TrustRadius’s 2026 Buying Disconnect Report found that 94% of those same buyers fact-check what AI tells them, with peer reviews, prior experience, demos, and conversations with actual humans. Gartner found that 69% of buyers turn to a salesperson to validate what the AI said.

So there is over a 90% chance that your buyer will ask AI about you, and then double-check with a human to see if it’s accurate. Or ask a human, then check with AI.

You now get two reference checks, and in my experience, most companies are not prepared for both.

I built Avenue9 and our Human-First AI Marketing® strategy on the belief that trust with people matters most; after all, they are still the ultimate buyers. No one was measuring that part, so this month I turned my research into a report you can run on your own site in about ten minutes.

I call it the Human+AI Trust Score, and it measures how likely humans are to refer you and how likely AI is to recommend you.

Every website grader, AEO checker, and AI visibility report I’ve seen looks at your business from the bots’ perspective. It checks whether the schema is valid, whether the headings are tagged, whether the page loads in under three seconds, whether ChatGPT can easily summarize your FAQs. All of that is fair, and some of it matters.

No grader looks at your entire online reputation from a human perspective. I haven’t found a report that asks whether a skeptical buyer would believe the people on your team actually exist. None of them notice that your testimonials have no names or numbers on them, that your “About” page is a stock photo and a generic mission statement, or that the last time anyone posted an original thought with something of value was late 2022.

Humans notice those things in the first seven seconds. AI engines work differently than Google’s search algorithm. They are exponentially more savvy and can weigh those factors when they decide how confidently to recommend you to a stranger.

Looking at your reputation with one eye closed costs you depth perception. You can see some signals of trust, but you can’t see how far away the buyer or bot still is from actually recommending you.

The Trust Signals

When a person decides whether to trust a business, they’re looking for four things, whether they can name them or not. I call them the Four E’s:

• Evidence that you’re real
  • real names, real faces, a real address, and a real phone number someone answers.
• Expertise that you know what you’re doing
  • original thinking, a clear point of view, work you can show.
• Experience that other people have had a good outcome with you
  • case studies, reviews, and results with numbers attached.
• Endorsement that someone credible is willing to vouch for you
  • testimonials with names and titles, partners, press, and awards.

AI works very similarly. The discipline the SEO industry calls Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is, underneath all the technical advice, an attempt to prove those same four things to a language model. The model reads your site, your reviews, and what the rest of the internet says about you, then decides whether to include your name in an answer.

In my opinion, the Four E’s are how humans and AI examine your trust level. The technical schema markup and FAQ blocks only make it easier to find your answers, but they don’t change your grade.

Five Types of Trust

The Human+AI Trust Score takes those four E’s and looks at them across five categories. It checks 28 trust signals, asks two AI engines (Claude and Gemini) what they know about your brand and whether they’d recommend you, and returns a score out of 100 based on your real online reputation with bodies and bots.

Human Trust – 25 points

This is the part of the exam every other grader skips: real people, real results, named testimonials, and a clear offer. The question behind it is, “Would a careful buyer believe you?”

AI Trust – 25 points

Can the engines read your site, recognize your brand, and recommend you for the questions your buyers actually ask? We don’t guess at the answer. We ask the engines and record the answer.

Reputation – 20 points

Reviews, mentions, and what the internet says about you when you’re not in the room are the Experience and Endorsement half of the Four E’s. We measure these where buyers and bots actually look for the answers.

Technical Security – 15 points

HTTPS, security headers, email authentication, and mobile speed feel like plumbing, but humans notice a slow site, distrust an unencrypted one, and quietly stop trusting it. So do the machines. These technical items show how serious you are about your business and building a brand buyers can trust.

Generosity – 15 points

How much do you give before you ask for anything? Humans trust the expert who shows their work, and the AI engines are trained on the same instinct. In the famous business book on trust, The Trusted Advisor, the authors found that selfishness, or being self-oriented, is the number one way to destroy relationships with buyers.

When we add up these rankings, each score falls into one of five trust levels that reflect how buyers see you: Unknown, Recognized, Credible, Preferred, and Recommended.

The full report shows you when human and AI trust diverge, because I’ve seen firms with loyal clients and glowing word of mouth sit at Unknown in AI answers. I’ve also seen well-structured sites, perfectly optimized for AI, that still lack traffic because human reviews tell a different story.

What can you do to build trust with buyers and bots at the same time?

The report ranks your top three fixes by how much they’d move a buyer, in plain language, so the first thing on the list is more likely to be “put names and faces on your testimonials” than “add Organization schema.” However, sometimes the technical stuff makes the list because it earns its place by helping a machine confirm what a human already believes.

We graded ourselves first.

We ran Avenue9 through the scan and published the result. As I write this, we score 75 – Preferred, with a public badge and report anyone can read. I’ll admit the number stung a little at first, because I expected the trust guy to ace the trust test and it fell like a C. But I wanted it to reflect where I am in my business honestly and accurately. And frankly, I am only two years in, and I have a handful of happy clients, but I don’t have the track record of a national agency.

The Trust Score You Deserve

Two notes about the score… The AI side will shift as models change and buyers change the questions they ask. The human score accurately reflects your trust with humans right now, but it will also move as you gain traction, and I’ve chosen to let it move because that is the reality of trust. It changes from day to day.

This score is a rating of your trust signals available on the Internet.

It is not the reputation you deserve. Most of the firms I work with are trusted experts. Their clients would walk through walls for them. The engineer who answers the hard question, the founder who tells the truth about a tradeoff, the consultant whose clients send their friends. That trust is real, and it’s often invisible to a buyer who’s never met them, and completely invisible to an AI engine reading a site built in a hurry four years ago.

Filling that gap between the trust you’ve earned and what a stranger can see is how Avenue9 helps our clients gain visibility, credibility, and trust with more buyers. Everything we do as an agency, from expert interviews and scalable storytelling to the content, conversations, and promotions that follow, is built to build trust with humans and with AI at the same time.

The score is where we start. The rest of our work is building the trust that powers more human referrals and AI recommendations.

I keep a close eye on how AI engines decide who to trust, because some of that is still being developed. But for now, I truly believe the most reliable way I know to win AI-powered search is to build trust with humans, on purpose, in public.

Find out what buyers and bots see. Get your free Human+AI Trust Score in about ten minutes: 28 signals, two AI engines, your trust level, and your top three fixes.

Want it raised for you? The Human+AI Trust Score Booster takes your report’s top priorities off your plate and moves you to the next trust level in 30 days.

Through December 31, it’s $2,027 instead of $2,500, and every dollar credits toward any AEO service. If you don’t reach the next level, we keep working the plan for another 30 days at no charge.