Trustpilot, the consumer-review platform that hosts feedback about businesses, partnered with Shopify to let merchants collect, manage, and showcase Trustpilot reviews inside their own storefronts via a newly enhanced Trustpilot app.
AI search engines and shopping assistants rely on data like Trustpilot's to determine the reputation, credibility, and authority of a brand. So for merchants, Trustpilot's reviews are one factor that can influence a brand's visibility. The company says that click-through traffic from AI search is up 1,490% in its latest financial year, indicating that its content is already a key resource for LLMs.
CEO Adrian Blair told Bloomberg:
“The key problem that all these Shopify merchants are facing is how do you actually build trust with customers now in the age of AI? There is so much that is now being created by AI, this kind of synthetic content, and Trustpilot is a canonical source of what people say about their experiences with businesses.”
The integrated Trustpilot reviews go live on Shopify today (June 29), marking the first of what Trustpilot hopes to be many partnerships to cement its role as a trusted source of customer feedback.
Trustpilot was founded in 2007 (same year as Google Reviews) and hosts more than 330M consumer reviews, attracting around 60M monthly active users globally, with insanely expensive subscription services to businesses accounting for most of its revenue. I never quite understood the incentive for businesses to pay Trustpilot. Why am I paying a company to hand them my customer's information and grow their platform into the source of truth about my business? It feels very Yelp-ish.
Personally, I won't be integrating Trustpilot reviews with client stores, unless they already have a healthy presence on the platform. Meaning, I'll showcase and build on the reviews they've got, but I won't be starting from scratch building a presence on Trustpilot.
