At a time when more and more customers are using AI agents and chatbots for online shopping, visual trust elements such as the Trustbadge or the Trustmark alone are no longer sufficient. These trust elements are designed for people, are intuitively recognised by people and influence purchasing decisions.
By contrast, AI systems cannot always reliably recognise and process the Trustbadge or Trustmark displayed on your website. Instead, AI systems require clear, machine-readable information so they can include information about online shops in their responses.
Trusted Shops therefore provides important trust information in a structured, machine-readable format. Among other things, Trusted Shops supplies AI systems with information about your shop, your Trusted Shops Trustmark, your average rating and your number of collected reviews. Only information that is already publicly available is provided.
How does Trusted Shops provide trust signals for AI systems?
Not all AI systems work in the same way. Depending on their technical architecture and intended purpose, AI systems access web content differently. As a result, there is no universal technical solution that works identically for all AI systems.
Trusted Shops has therefore developed different methods to make trust signals available to as many AI systems as possible.
Some systems:
- analyse the fully rendered page content
- execute JavaScript
- interpret dynamically loaded content
Examples of systems that can execute JavaScript include Googlebot and AI crawlers with JavaScript rendering. For these systems, Trusted Shops provides trust signals as structured data directly via the Trustbadge. The information is loaded automatically via JavaScript and provided as JSON-LD.
Other systems:
- primarily read the original HTML source code
- execute little or no JavaScript
- evaluate only directly available information
In these cases, providing the information via the Trustbadge alone is not sufficient. Because the crawler does not execute the Trustbadge's JavaScript, the trust data provided through it may remain invisible to the crawler. This technical limitation does not only affect Trusted Shops but also many other modern web integrations.
For this reason, Trusted Shops also provides the trust information as structured markup for direct integration into your website's HTML source code. This makes the trust signals available as soon as the page loads and accessible to crawlers that do not execute JavaScript or do so only to a limited extent.
We therefore recommend integrating the structured markup into your website header. This can be done either manually or – for some shop systems – via the relevant Trusted Shops plugin.
You can find more information about integrating the markup here: How do I integrate trust signals for AI systems into my website?