Recommended or Rejected: Does AI Trust You

Are you worried your business will disappear online when AI search takes over? Wondering how to make sure AI tools recommend your company?

In this article, you'll discover how to optimize your online presence for AI search engines and build trust signals that get your business recommended.

Why AI Visibility Is the Future of Online Discovery

For the past twenty years, businesses had to win over two parties: the customer and the search engine. You won over search engines through great content and SEO, or you paid for ads.

Now, everything's changing as consumer reliance on ChatGPT and other large language models grows.

Blue links—those clickable results you've been seeing on Google for twenty years—are dying. They weren't built for you. They were built based on words that met an algorithm's demand. AI search is different because it understands context and intent.

Consumers ask a question and receive an answer specific to their needs, complete with an explanation and a clear next step.

Here's what makes this shift critical: there's no middle ground anymore. In the old system, you could appear on page two and make progress toward page one. With AI, you're either recommended as part of the answer or you're rejected. Nothing in between.

This binary outcome changes everything about online visibility.

If you don't show up in AI, you're in trouble. You'll have a major lead problem. You won't generate enough customers or revenue. You'll be left wondering what happened to a business that was successful ten years ago.

The Opportunity Right Now: AI Trust Signals

Many companies and marketers are still shockingly neglecting AI visibility. They assume Google will always work exactly as it does today. They're not thinking the way AI thinks. They're not seeing the hundreds of thousands of people transitioning every day from legacy search to modern AI-based search.

This creates a window of opportunity.

You can think differently. You can win the trust of the human customer and the AI engine. You'll get recommended far more often and rejected far less frequently. And you'll be way ahead when the entire world has shifted to this new way of finding what they want online.

This is bigger than ranking number one on Google search ever was. If AI consistently recommends you, and the whole world uses it to find experts and businesses, you've created a sustainable competitive advantage. This will literally make or break businesses in the coming years.

The shift is happening now. AI is taking over the entire experience of learning, buying, and shopping online.

You can't afford to ignore this transformation. Even if you're skeptical about AI, your business needs to succeed between now and whatever the future holds. The way to ensure success is by leaning into AI visibility rather than pretending it doesn't matter.

Understanding AI Trust Signals: The Foundation of AI Visibility

Getting AI to recommend you comes down to trust signals. A trust signal is any piece of content ever produced online about your company—by you or by someone else.

Every review ever written about your company, whether positive or negative, is a trust signal. Every piece of content you produce, every article on your website, every video out there, the different tools you have on your site, and everything said about you—these all become trust signals.

Think of your AI trust score like a credit score. Just as there are things that ding your credit and things that build your credit in finance, it's the same with how AI views your brand. AI is getting much better at consuming all these signals—whether on social media, YouTube, or your website.

But here's the critical distinction: AI doesn't rank businesses the way Google does. There's no such thing as “ranking first” in AI. If AI sees your brand as having an authority score on particular subject matter or a particular area, then you're likely to be mentioned based on that score.

Here's another important factor: every AI account is different. You and someone else could do the exact same search right now and get different answers. Your AI has been trained on you, and theirs has been trained on them. AI understands every user uniquely.

It'll get to the point where AI can tell if you're a high-end, quality-driven buyer or a budget-minded buyer. Your AI will learn about you and recommend businesses consistent with your buying history and past themes. Google never did that.

There are many types of AI trust signals grouped into three tiers: technical signals, authority-based signals, and brand-based signals. Let's explore how to get started with one from each tier.

#1: Build Technical Trust Signals With Schema Markup

One of the biggest ways AI gets what it wants is through schema or advanced schema on websites. This is a technical signal that AI uses to either recommend or reject your business.

Schema is code that you inject on your website—labeling for the backend so AI can easily understand what you're talking about and what you're showing.

There are several types of schema you should implement:

Product Schema: If you have products on your site, there should be schema behind that content. Product schema communicates detailed information about what you sell—specifications, features, availability, and other product attributes.

Review Schema: Review schema structures your customer testimonials so AI can easily identify, parse, and reference them when answering questions about your business. Without this markup, AI might struggle to recognize your reviews as legitimate social proof.

FAQ Schema: FAQ schema markup organizes your frequently asked questions so AI can instantly access them. When someone asks a question that matches your FAQ content, AI knows exactly where to find the answer on your site.

Content Freshness Schema: A big technical signal that needs schema is content freshness, which relates to your authority. You've probably started seeing articles that say “last updated on such and such date.” That now needs to be required on every piece of content you have.

Here's the catch: if you just show it on the front end (what the viewer sees) without using schema, it's not perceived the same way. You actually need schema that shows when that particular article or piece of content was last updated.

How to Add Schema to Your Website

You'll need to add this schema to your website's backend. If you're not technical, work with your web developer or use schema plugins if you're on platforms like WordPress.

Alternatively, you can use AI to help you implement schema. Take the code from one of your web pages, paste it into an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude, and prompt it: “Act as an expert in schema for AI visibility. I want you to check this page to make sure it's fully optimized for AI. What schema am I missing, if any?” The AI will analyze your page and identify opportunities to add schema.

#2: Strengthen Authority Trust Signals With Pricing Transparency

Authority-based signals help AI understand your brand's market authority. One of the most powerful authority signals you can build is pricing transparency.

AI understands that the foremost question every single consumer has—the first question of the buyer's journey—is roughly “What's this going to cost?”

You need three things to build strong pricing authority signals:

A Robust Pricing Page: Create a pricing page that explains value in your industry, what drives costs up and down, and discusses ROI. Don't just list prices—help people understand pricing in your industry.

The River Pools story illustrates this perfectly. When the housing market crashed in 2008 and the pool business was dying, the company started answering every question customers were asking—including pricing questions. They created content like “How much does a fiberglass pool cost?” with real numbers and pricing ranges.

Competitors thought this was crazy. Why would you give away pricing information? But this transparency made River Pools the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world and turned the company around.

A Pricing Video: Video content amplifies your pricing authority. Create video content that walks people through pricing considerations, helping them understand the factors that influence costs in your industry.

A Pricing Estimator: Interactive pricing estimators and calculators are becoming increasingly critical. Already, when you do service-based searches on your cell phone, you're seeing “Have AI check prices.” Click that, and the AI asks you a series of questions, goes to contractors to get information, and comes back with a report—without you ever engaging the contractor directly.

AI will soon show you in the AI summary which contractors near you have an estimator on their site based on what it was able to see and read.

Tools like Common Ninja and Ion Interactive help you build these calculators without coding knowledge. You can create estimators for virtually any product or service—pool installations, software implementations, consulting packages, manufacturing quotes, and more.

Additional Authority Signals: Other authority signals include whether you're on Google page one for that particular thing (though this isn't something you can just go fix immediately) and the accuracy of your claims.

AI really cares about the accuracy of claims. If you say, “I am the most successful coach for stay-at-home moms who are coming back into the workforce,” AI doesn't like that unless you back it up with proof.

AI will ding you if you have a claim that's not backed by some type of proof. However, if you say “I won this particular award for top ten coaches in the world for this particular niche” and then you source back to it, that's an authoritative outbound citation—a major trust signal that helps prove the accuracy of the claim.

You can't just make claims anymore without backing them up. Every claim needs supporting evidence that AI can verify.

#3: Maximize Brand Trust Signals Through Reviews and Recognition

Brand-based signals (which sometimes overlap with authority signals) help AI understand your reputation and credibility in the marketplace.

Create a Comprehensive Reviews Page: The best trust signal you can use to improve brand signal right now is creating a very robust review page on your website that aggregates reviews from multiple platforms.

Here's why this matters: Some AI platforms have limited access to review APIs. For example, ChatGPT doesn't have access to the Google Reviews API. It can see some surface-level Google Reviews, but not all of them. However, it's going to every other platform where it can get them.

The solution is to create a dedicated page on your website that displays reviews from across platforms—Google, Facebook, Nextdoor, Yelp, and any other platforms where your company has reviews. Take a handful of those reviews and put them on a very robust review page for your website.

This helps the AI that couldn't see everything in your Google Reviews due to API issues. Now they can see it on your site, and it makes a big difference to your trust score.

When you do this correctly—showing reviews with the right schema, visually displaying them just like the original platform did, and linking back to the platform you're referencing—AI sees it as legitimate. Link back to your Facebook page, your Google Reviews, and other review platforms. This approach has been tested and is very effective.

AI is intent on reading as many of your reviews as possible to make a solid recommendation. The best thing you can do is create this very robust review page on your site.

Build an Industry Awards and Recognition Page: Industry awards and recognition represent another major brand signal. If you notice, when AI recommends a company, they'll almost always cite an award or recognition that the company has received.

This is a huge signal. Just as you now want to create a review page as a marketer, you also want to create a very robust industry awards and recognition page on your website.

Include every award, certification, recognition, industry ranking, or honor your business has received. Make this information easily accessible and properly structured so AI can reference it when explaining why you're a credible choice.

#4: Audit Your AI Visibility With Testing Tools

You can't improve what you don't measure. Start testing whether AI engines actually recommend your business when asked relevant questions.

Go to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or other AI platforms and ask the kinds of questions your customers would ask about finding a business like yours or solving the problems you address.

The key is to test from a neutral position. If you're using your regular ChatGPT account, the AI has been trained on your history and will be biased toward recommending you. You need a “naked” account with no history, or you can toggle off the personalization feature in your ChatGPT settings temporarily while testing.

This same challenge exists across platforms. You need to test on Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and other AI models, since people use different platforms based on their preferences.

Pay attention to whether AI recommends you, recommends competitors, or doesn't recommend anyone specific. Look at which sources AI cites when it does make recommendations.

AI Trust Signals has a dedicated tool for checking whether AI engines recommend your business. It automates this testing process across multiple AI platforms and helps you identify gaps in your visibility.

The testing reveals exactly where you need to improve—whether that's adding pricing content, implementing schema markup, building more comparison content, or addressing specific customer questions you've been avoiding.

Other Notes From This Episode

• Connect with Michael Stelzner @Stelzner on Instagram and @Mike_Stelzner on X.
• Watch this interview and other exclusive content from Social Media Examiner on YouTube.

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