Trust gap
A trust gap is when AI answers name your brand but don't use or cite your own pages, so the platforms know you but don't trust your site as a source.
A trust gap is when AI answers name your brand but don't use your website as a source. The platforms know who you are. When they need a page to back up what they say, they pick someone else's.
It matters because the pages an answer uses shape what it says about you. If those are always other people's pages, you have little say in how you're described, and you get fewer of the clicks that come from citations.
How to spot one
Compare how often you're named with how often your own site is used. If you're named in plenty of answers and your pages turn up in few of them, there's a gap.
For example, Kestrel Roasters is named in 50 of its 140 answers this week. Only 8 of those 50 use a page from Kestrel's website. In the other 42, the platforms describe Kestrel using review sites, a marketplace listing and a competitor's comparison page.
Why it happens
Usually the platform can't find a page of yours that answers the question as well as another site does. Your pages may be hard for bots to read, slow, or behind scripts. They may not answer the question directly. Or they may say less than a review site that has tested your product.
Sometimes it's simply that independent pages are more convincing. A platform asked "Is Kestrel any good?" will lean on reviews before Kestrel's own homepage.
How to close it
- Check that AI bots can read your pages and that the text is in the page's HTML
- Write pages that answer the questions people ask about you, with plain facts near the top
- Give your pages things other sites don't have, such as prices, specifications and your own data
In AnswerOrbit
The Named against cited chart on the Overview splits your answers four ways, including the answers that name you without using your website. Citations shows how often your site is used at all. Page checks in Recommendations shows why one of your pages isn't used for a prompt, compared with pages that are.