Yes Trustpilot is still relevant in 2026 more than ever. In 2025, we identified 2 main factors that determine whether you should leverage Trustpilot to grow your D2C eCommerce brand or not:
- Your brand size/power
- Your main customer acquisition channel
This hasn't changed, however in 2026, one thing has fundamentally changed since 2025: AI search. A growing share of high-intent shoppers now use AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — to discover and compare products before buying. These engines don't crawl brand websites for trust signals. They pull from third-party review platforms, and Trustpilot is consistently one of the most cited sources.
According to a 2026 AI search report by AirOps, 85% of brand mentions in AI-generated answers come from third-party pages, not the brand's own website.This means Trustpilot's relevance in 2026 is no longer just about search rankings and social proof for human visitors. It is now a direct input into whether AI recommends your brand or your competitor's.
Here is a video we for 2025 we discuss factors.
Brand Size
If your brand has global recognition and a market cap of over $1B, it’s unlikely that your Trustpilot profile will impact your growth. For example, Amazon:
However, if you have fewer unique monthly visitors than Trustpilot, you should care about your Trustpilot rating.
The majority of you reading this article would fall under this bucket, as only a handful of companies have a higher amount of traffic than Trustpilot. Have a look at their stats:
Trustpilot is ranked among the 1000 most visited websites, so if you’re not there yet, you might as well take advantage of the traffic channel they built to grow your brand.
This leads me to the next factor...
Customer Acquisition Channel
If you have at least 50% coming from Google (organic + paid), Trustpilot likely impacts your brand perception.
In 2026, there is a third acquisition channel to factor in: AI search.
Gartner projects that up to 25% of traditional search volume will shift to AI chatbots and virtual agents by the end of 2026, with over 60% of all searches expected to happen through AI by 2030. Refernece.
Critically, AI search traffic converts at 4.4x higher rates than traditional organic search — these are high-intent shoppers ready to buy, not casual browsers.The implication for Trustpilot is significant. AI engines evaluate brands using three signals: Relevance, Rating, and Recency. They don't look at your website. They look at what third parties say about you — and Trustpilot, hosting over 300 million reviews across 150+ countries, is one of the most influential data sources these engines reference. If your brand doesn't have a consistent stream of fresh, verified reviews, AI algorithms skip over you and recommend your competitors. It doesn't matter how many reviews you collected two years ago. What matters is your review velocity right now.
Here is how ChatGPT references Trustpilot now:
Let's look at one example below:
Most of Tirebuyer’s non-direct traffic (new visitors) is coming from Search.
Now, let's see what their branded search result looks like:
As you can see, the second result after the main website is Trustpilot.
And this is considering that their profile is not as active, with only 300+ reviews.
So what do we learn from this?
Google prioritizes a brand’s Trustpilot profile when a person is searching for reviews, and shows it right after the main website. All because Trustpilot is the biggest third-party platform in this context.
If we change the search criteria “reviews brand” 90% of the time Trustpilot page will be first. This doesn’t matter even if a brand has more Google reviews like this example:
The Google Reviews profile still doesn’t get ranked. This is surprising given that Google does prioritize their own data other 3rd party website most of the time, however when it comes to reviews, Google ones are mostly relevant for local business and locations rather than online ones.
But let’s go back for a second to the main question: “What is the impact of Trustpilot rating for new visitors?”
That is one thing that we can't answer with certainty.
However, if you are measuring your traffic sources & conversion rate of those visitors, you could estimate this by taking the conversion rate of Trustpilot referred visitors and multiplying it based on how many visitors have likely been exposed to your profile snippet in Google search results.
This is outside of the scope of this article to create a model of this kind of evaluation, but we might come back to it in the future.
At the end of the day, it will still be up to you to decide if the investment of keeping your rating satisfactory is worth it.
Apart from these main factors, there are a few other points that could also be significant in terms of how much Trustpilot impacts your brand awareness / reputation.
Your customers’ location & language
Even though English is the predominant language where Trustpilot has most influence, It isn’t spread evenly. For example, if we look at Trustpilot’s website in Canada, it has only 1M visitors per month.
While the UK website, has a whopping 14M visits per month, even though the population-wise its only x2 more of Canada
And if we look at Trustpilot’s main (.com) website, the traffic by country is even more interesting:
UK traffic is larger than the US even though the US eCommerce market is bigger by a factor than the UK one.
This shows that US consumers are less likely to be impacted by Trustpilot, while for the UK, it is very relevant, especially when you have the majority of them coming from search.
In general, we can say that Trustpilot has the biggest market share in Europe (no surprise, given it's a Denmark-based company).
So, if you have customers who are in the EU, it's likely that they will look at the Trustpilot profile if they don’t know your brand yet.
AOV (average order value)
The size of the purchase determines how much reviews influence buying decision. The larger the purchase amount and the more unique/original the product is, the more likely new customers will research it and look for social proof.
For example, it's unlikely someone will search a Trustpilot profile for toothpaste, even for an unknown brand. However for something like an e-bike, people would look for other customers feedback before they make a purchase decision.
Alternative social proof
Now all this doesn’t mean that you have to use Trustpilot specifically to impact your eCommerce brand growth.
You can also use alternative review platforms that have public profiles, like Reviews.IO.
Let's look at how they compare to Trustpilot:
Yotpo is another alternative. However, important to note that you can’t put Yotpo in the same category as Trustpilot.
Even though Yotpo has quite a bit of traffic, most of it is not related to customers searching for reviews, as they don’t have a public listing like Trustpilot.
Yotpo can still shows the size of their business customer base, but not a public listing like Trustpilot.
As you can see, the closest platforms with public profiles don’t even come close to traffic size, and even when they have more reviews than Trustpilot, they are unlikely to outrank them.
Here is an example:
Again, it depends on how your target customers make a decision, and in some cases, it might not matter that your primary review profile is not first. However, I would be concerned if it's not ranked at least on the first page.
Conlusions & Summary
For most D2C eCommerce brands Trustpilot is still relevant in 2025 & 2026.
What has changed in 2026 is the addition of a third, more urgent dimension. Beyond brand perception and search ranking, your Trustpilot profile is now an active input into AI recommendation engines that are increasingly responsible for directing high-converting shoppers to specific brands.
Research shows that profiles not updated within the last quarter are 3x more likely to lose visibility in AI-generated answers, and only 30% of brands maintain consistent visibility from one AI answer to the next. Review velocity — how many fresh, verified reviews you are generating right now — has become an acquisition metric in its own right.For most D2C eCommerce brands, this makes Trustpilot not less relevant in 2026, but significantly more so.
Trustpilot stillbrings the majority of Search traffic, even though the metrics will vary on your brand size, channel and customer location.
For someone in the UK, the impact might be a couple of times greater than in the US.
It boils down to if Trustpilot has an influence on new visitors that are making a buying decision, and that will impact your own decision if you want to invest in improving your Trustpilot profile in 2025.
If you do decide to go all in improving your Trustpilot score & double your verified reviews on your Trustpilot profile, then consider StackTome.
Happy review gathering!
