Twenty years of thinking about brand trust — and why it matters more than ever
AI has changed where buyers start their research. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews are increasingly the first stop — and the brands they recommend are the ones with the strongest trust footprint, not the biggest ad budget.
That's the argument Scott Baradell made in Trust Signals: Brand Building in a Post-Truth World, published in 2022 — before AI recommendations were part of the conversation. The book mapped out exactly how careful buyers evaluate brands: the media coverage they look for, the reviews they check, the website signals they notice. When AI search emerged, Scott realized LLMs were doing the same thing, drawing on the accumulated trust footprint a brand had built across the web.
Scott is founder and CEO of Idea Grove, a Dallas-based B2B PR and visibility agency that has helped companies including Amazon, NEC, Motorola Solutions, and Sabre build authority and improve discoverability for nearly two decades. TrustSignals.com is where he thinks out loud about what brand trust means in an era when AI is increasingly the first stop in the buyer's journey.
