Yes, by a wide margin. A Seer Interactive study published May 14, 2026 analyzed 804,491 AI responses across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity and found that brands with no verified Trustpilot profile had a median AI citation rate of 1%. Brands with even a minimal, low-volume profile jumped to a median of 53.5%. That is a 52 percentage point gap tied to one specific, controllable thing: whether a brand has claimed a presence on a review site at all.
What did Seer actually measure, and how?
The study, led by Seer's R&D lead Nick Haigler, pulled 804,491 AI responses to 15,783 unique prompts, covering 1,926 brands across eight verticals: money and insurance, shopping and fashion, travel and vacation, home services, health and medical, education and training, electronics and technology, and business services. Data collection ran primarily in March 2026.
Seer sorted brands into four Trustpilot tiers. T0 is the control group: no verified active profile. T1 means a minimal presence with low review volume. T2 is an active, moderately managed profile. T3 is an actively managed profile with high review volume. To isolate Trustpilot's effect from the fact that bigger, more established brands tend to have both more reviews and more organic authority, Seer matched the T0 control group against the other tiers using Ahrefs data on search volume, domain authority, backlinks and organic traffic, then built a stricter cohort of 206 brands per tier, matched specifically on Domain Rating, to separate the Trustpilot effect from general brand strength.
Prompts were split across four funnel stages: Awareness (broad category questions with no brand named), Evaluation (direct brand comparisons), Intent (a buyer already considering a specific brand), and Trust or Reviews (reputation-focused queries). That stage breakdown turns out to matter more than the headline number.
How big is the jump, and does it hold up across every platform?
The jump from T0 to T1, no profile to a minimal one, is the single largest move in the data: from a 1% median citation rate to 53.5%, even in the Domain Rating-matched cohort designed to strip out brand strength as an explanation. Going from T1 to a more actively managed T2 profile adds roughly another 25 percentage points, and the jump from T2 to a high-volume T3 profile in the matched cohort adds about 6 more. In other words, most of the benefit comes from simply existing on the platform. The returns to maintaining and growing that presence are real but smaller.
The effect holds across platforms, with some variation in size. Controlling for brand size and organic strength, Trustpilot citation rates by platform came out at 57.9% for ChatGPT, 51.9% for Perplexity and 48.9% for Google AI Mode, with Gemini citing Trustpilot least often of the four. We've covered the gap between what ranks on Google and what ChatGPT actually cites before, and this is another instance of the same pattern: a signal that moves one model meaningfully moves the others by a different amount, not by zero.
Does this matter at every stage of a buyer's research, or just at the review stage?
This is the finding most worth sitting with. Trust and review sites made up only 1.51% of citations at the Awareness stage, when someone asks a broad, unbranded category question, but climbed to 24.27% at the Intent stage, when a buyer is actively evaluating a specific brand they already have in mind. General web sources dominate early-stage queries (87.25% of citations at Awareness) and fall off as the buyer gets closer to a decision (65.50% at Intent), with review and trust content filling most of the gap.
That maps onto something PR people already know intuitively about how buyers behave, just with AI citation data behind it now: early discovery runs on broad editorial and reference content, while late-stage evaluation runs on social proof. A brand that has earned strong press coverage but has no review presence is well set up for the Awareness stage and comparatively exposed at the Intent stage, right when a buyer is deciding whether to actually act.
Does this just mean I should go buy reviews?
No, and Seer's own data argues against that reading. The study measured whether a review profile exists and how actively it's managed, not whether the reviews themselves are fabricated or incentivized. Buying fake reviews is a distinct and much riskier move: platforms like Trustpilot actively police for it, and a brand caught manipulating reviews risks the exact kind of coverage a breach or trust crisis communications plan is built to handle, for a much worse reason than the one that plan usually covers. The practical takeaway from Seer's data is narrower and safer: claim your profile, respond to real reviews, and treat the review page as a piece of owned infrastructure worth maintaining, the same way you'd maintain a company blog or a careers page.
It's also worth being honest about what the study doesn't prove. Seer's own research notes state plainly that the data cannot establish causation cleanly: brands that invest in managing their review presence likely also invest more broadly in marketing and reputation work, so some of the lift attributed to Trustpilot tiers may reflect that broader investment rather than the review profile specifically. Seer is also not a neutral party here in one specific sense, Trustpilot separately published its own white paper citing the same findings, which is a reason to read the original methodology rather than take any single summary's framing at face value.
How does this fit with what we know about AI citations generally?
It fits as a second, independent confirmation of a pattern Muck Rack's AI citation study already established from a different angle: third-party sources carry AI citation weight that owned content mostly doesn't. Muck Rack found paid and advertorial content at 0.3% of citations industry-wide. Seer's data adds a specific, actionable version of the same idea for review sites: review and trust content was the second-most-cited source category overall in its sample, and a brand that treats a review platform as someone else's problem is leaving a meaningful, measurable citation channel unclaimed. Getting cited by ChatGPT already covers the earned-media side of this; a claimed, managed review profile is one of the few additional levers that showed up this clearly in a controlled study.
The direct answer, for anyone who read this far
A Trustpilot profile moves a brand's median AI citation rate from 1% with no profile to 53.5% with even a minimal one, according to Seer Interactive's study of over 800,000 AI responses across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity, published May 14, 2026. The effect is strongest at the Intent stage of a buyer's research, where review and trust content accounts for roughly a quarter of citations, and it holds even after controlling for a brand's existing organic strength. It isn't proof that buying reviews works, and the study itself cautions that correlation with broader marketing investment could explain part of the lift. What it does support is narrower and more useful: claim the profile, manage it honestly, and stop treating review sites as someone else's channel.
If you want help figuring out where your brand's AI citation gaps actually are, request a quotation and we'll walk through what the data shows for your category.
