“If you imagine AI agents are out there doing the shopping, they want to know as much as possible about different businesses, and the best AI agents will be the ones that use the kind of data that Trustpilot has,” CEO Adrian Blair said in an interview with Bloomberg News Tuesday (March 17). “What we’d like to do is partner with major players in e-commerce to make best use of this data.”
The report adds that Trustpilot expects its margins to reach 30% by 2030 due in part to this effort, with the company benefitting from artificial intelligence (AI) large language models using its content.
Click-throughs from AI-powered search are up 1,490% year over year, while the site was the fifth most cited domain in the world on ChatGPT in January of this year, Bloomberg added, citing data from Promptwatch.
“The large language models are giving us a whole new surface onto which to project Trustpilot use,” Blair said. “We’ve seen a massive increase in the amount of exposure they’re getting and the amount of traffic that’s coming through to us from large language models.”
The report adds that Trustpilot was caught up in last month’s software stock sell-off, triggered by Anthropic’s new AI-powered legal tool. That release led to fears that AI could weaken demand for software companies’ products.
But no matter what capabilities AI develops “there will still be people and there will still be businesses and people will still be having experiences with businesses, and Trustpilot is the place where they go to record those experiences,” Blair told Bloomberg.
“We have this huge database of history of those experiences, and the evidence is that’s becoming more valuable as AI grows in capability.”
PYMNTS Intelligence examined the rise of AI-powered shopping in the recent report “How AI Becomes the Place Consumers Start Everything.”
As covered here last week, that report shows that consumers are “turning to dedicated AI platforms to plan, learn, shop and decide, compressing the familiar search-to-purchase sequence into a more conversational flow where intent is stated once and then refined through follow-up prompts.”
The findings showed that among consumers who chiefly use dedicated AI platforms, 43% said they had completely replaced older methods, while 42% reported that they now use search less.