Trustpilot partners with AI companies as traditional search declines
Trustpilot is reported to be pursuing partnerships with large eCommerce companies as AI-driven shopping gains traction.
In an interview with Bloomberg News [paywall], chief executive Adrian Blair said that AI agents acting on behalf of consumers require lots of information about the businesses they’re willing to interact with. He said the most effective systems will rely on datasets like those held by Trustpilot, adding that the company aims to work with major eCommerce sites to make greater use of its data.
Trustpilot expects its operating margin to reach 30% by 2030, with the improvement linked partly to the use of its content by LLMs. According to Bloomberg, traffic patterns are beginning to reflect this. Click-throughs from AI-based search increased by 1,490% over the past year, thanks in no small part to search giant Google’s decision to make an AI search the default.
Data from Promptwatch indicates that Trustpilot ranked as the fifth most cited domain globally in ChatGPT in January this year.
Blair said that large language models have created a new channel through which Trustpilot content is presented, noting a rise in exposure and referral traffic from LLM-based algorithms.
In February 2026, Amazon and OpenAI announced an agreement to deploy genAI systems on AWS using customised models intended for Amazon’s consumer-facing applications. The arrangement is said to cover infrastructure provision and model development.
Elsewhere, Walmart’s partnership with Google lets users purchase goods inside the Gemini chatbot. Google has similar arrangements with Shopify and other retailers.
Shopify’s Universal Commerce Protocol lets AI agents access product data and take transactions to checkout, so ensuring potential buyers remain on the AI platform (in this case Gemini) rather than navigate to the retailer’s site. Microsoft’s Copilot Checkout collaboration with PayPal falls into the same pattern.
Shopify has pursued similar partnerships including with Microsoft so merchants can sell from a chatbot interfaces. Its recent product updates describe “agentic storefronts” in which transactions take place inside AI interactions. For marketing professionals, the loss of valuable data when shoppers purchase through a third-party proxy is, to varying degrees, balanced by the income from trade via AI platforms.
Amazon currently challenges third-party AI agents accessing its platform without authorisation, and is developing its own assistant to retain control over user data and advertising revenue, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Trustpilot’s Adrian Blair argued in the Bloomberg News interview that user-generated reviews retain value regardless of the involvement of AI in the purchasing process. He said consumers will continue to “have experiences” with businesses, describing Trustpilot’s data set of reviews as a long-term asset whose relevance is increasing.
The company’s shares were affected by a broader decline in software stocks last month, sparked by the media imagining the death of SaaS platforms on the back of claims made by Anthropic.
PYMNTS Intelligence’s report [email wall], “How AI Becomes the Place Consumers Start Everything,” describes consumers beginning their product research and shopping on AI platforms, refining their prompts iteratively rather than successive ‘traditional’ searches.
(Image source: “E-Commerce Visa (Test tamron 17-50 2.8)” by Fosforix is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.)
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