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.
For AI systems, however, the Trustbadge or Trustmark visible on your website is not enough on its own. AI systems require clear, machine-readable information in order to assess and recommend online shops.
Your collected reviews, the Trustmark and other trust signals must therefore be provided in a way that enables AI systems to reliably identify and interpret them. For this reason, Trusted Shops makes this information available in a structured and machine-readable format.
How do AI systems analyse my website?
Not all AI systems work in the same way. Depending on their technical architecture and intended purpose, AI systems access web content differently.
Some systems:
- analyse the fully rendered page content
- execute JavaScript
- interpret dynamically loaded content
Other systems:
- primarily read the original HTML source code
- execute little or no JavaScript
- evaluate only directly available information
As a result, there is no universal technical solution that works identically for all AI systems.
This makes it even more important to provide trust signals in a way that is as clear, structured, consistent, verifiable and machine-readable as possible in order to support as many AI systems as possible.
Examples of such trust signals include:
- reviews
- independent certifications such as the Trustmark
- your company information
How does Trusted Shops provide trust signals for AI systems?
Trusted Shops provides trust signals as structured data directly through the Trustbadge. The information is currently loaded automatically via JavaScript and made available in the form of JSON-LD.
Thanks to this approach, many important crawlers can process the information, including:
- traditional search engines
- AI crawlers with JavaScript rendering capabilities
- systems such as Googlebot
These systems can interpret content loaded dynamically via JavaScript and analyse the trust signals accordingly for use in their recommendations.
However, some AI crawlers process JavaScript only to a limited extent or not at all. This particularly affects systems that primarily analyse the original HTML source code.
In such cases, the Trustbadge, your collected reviews or other structured trust data may not be visible to the respective AI crawler. This technical limitation does not only affect Trusted Shops but also many other modern web integrations.
Trusted Shops is therefore currently working on extending its plugins for Shopify, Magento, Shopware, PrestaShop, WooCommerce and JTL. Following this update, the structured JSON-LD data will be embedded directly into the website header for users of these plugins.
As a result, the structured trust information will:
- be available immediately when the page is first loaded
- be provided directly in the HTML
- be readable by all crawlers — even without JavaScript execution
This will significantly improve the accessibility of trust signals for AI systems.
Until the plugin update becomes available, and for all businesses that do not use one of the supported plugins, we recommend manually embedding structured data in the header of the website. This manual integration makes it possible to provide structured trust information directly, without relying on JavaScript.