TrustRank
TrustRank is a method for separating good sites from spam by starting from a few trusted sites and following their links outward.
TrustRank is a method for telling useful websites from spam using links. You start with a small set of sites that people have checked by hand and trust. Trust then flows out along their links: sites they link to get some, sites those sites link to get a little less, and it keeps thinning out from there. Spam sites rarely get links from trusted ones, so they end up with little trust.
The idea comes from a 2004 research paper by researchers at Stanford and Yahoo. It's worth knowing because the thinking behind it shaped how SEO people talk about links.
How it works
Think of it as a game of introductions. If someone you trust introduces a friend, you trust the friend a bit. If the friend introduces someone else, you trust them a bit less. A stranger nobody has introduced starts with nothing.
For example, if a national newspaper's food section links to a coffee blog, and that blog links to Fernhill Coffee, Fernhill picks up a little trust through the chain. A site linked only from a cluster of spam blogs picks up none, however many links it has.
Does Google use it?
Google has never said it uses TrustRank as described in the paper. It has said that links help it judge pages, and that it tries to tell trusted sources from spam, which is the same general idea. SEO tools build their own trust-style scores, and those are estimates from outside.
Trust in AI search
AI platforms decide which sources to read and believe in their own ways, and they don't publish how. What you can see is which sites they actually use for your questions. A site the answers keep citing is one the platforms treat as worth reading, whatever its score in an SEO tool.
In AnswerOrbit
Sources shows which domains and pages the answers to your prompts used, how often, and on which platforms. The Platforms tab shows which sources each platform prefers.