What it is
Trust signals are the ordinary marks of a real business that a store shows on its pages: a privacy policy, return and terms pages, a contact phone number and email, links to social profiles and a Google Business Profile. A shopper reads these without thinking as a sign the store is legitimate. An AI assistant can read the same marks as data: signals about the business behind the store.
How common it is
Just over half of audited stores (53%) show these signals. The audit scans your pages for this set, the policy pages, a visible phone and email, social and Google Business links, and a basic email record (SPF) behind the domain. A store can sell real products and still come up short here, because the signals are scattered across the footer and the contact page and easy to leave half-finished.
Why it costs you
When a shopper asks an AI for a recommendation, it draws on what it can find about each store across the web. A store with no clear contact details, no policy pages, and no presence it can tie together gives both shoppers and machines less evidence that a real business sits behind the site. Systems that compare stores have less to connect and verify, and one they cannot confirm is easy to leave off a short list. The signals you treat as boilerplate are what shows a real business is there at all, to a person and to a machine.
What good looks like
The signals should be present and consistent everywhere a person or a machine would check. Real contact details, a phone number and an email, sit in reach rather than behind a form. The policy pages, privacy, returns, and terms, exist and are linked. The store’s social profiles and Google Business Profile are linked from the site, and the business name and details match across them. Consistency is the point: the same real business, described the same way wherever it appears.
Check it in 30 seconds
Open your home page and footer and look for a phone number, an email, and links to your policies and social profiles; a contact page counts too. If a visitor cannot find these in a few clicks, the same signals are harder for a machine to find and verify.
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Run the free audit to see whether your store shows the trust marks an AI looks for.