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209. Bull, Bear & Beyond – Trustpilot: executive interview
14 Plays24 days ago
In this interview, Adrian Blair, CEO of Trustpilot, discusses the three main drivers of the company’s recent momentum: a greater focus on larger enterprise customers, continued progress in the US, which remains its fastest-growing market, and stronger demand as Trustpilot reviews become more visible in large language models, to the extent that Trustpilot was the fifth most cited domain on ChatGPT in January. He emphasises the importance of trust and governance on the platform and discusses how Trustpilot is using AI to detect suspicious patterns and remove fake reviews while maintaining a clear separation between commercial decision-making and content oversight. Blair argues that open customer feedback is becoming more strategically valuable for businesses, both as a tool for operational improvement and as a way to improve visibility in AI-driven discovery. He also points to scope for further margin expansion, supported by product development efficiencies and ongoing scale benefits.
Trustpilot is an open review platform that brings consumers and businesses together through customer feedback. It operates a freemium subscription model, offering paid tools that help businesses collect, analyse and showcase reviews, while supporting consumers with independent, transparent information to inform purchasing decisions.
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About ‘Bull, Bear & Beyond’
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Transcript
Introduction of Adrian Blair and Trustpilot
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Edison TV. Today I'm speaking to Adrian Blair, who is Chief Executive Officer at Trustpilot, a UK-listed business who are the world's leading open access customer referral platform.
00:00:20
Speaker
Adrian, many thanks for joining me today. Great to be here.
Evolution and Value of Trustpilot's Open Platform
00:00:24
Speaker
And starting off by introducing Trustpilot, obviously your your business has evolved quite a lot over the last few years. Can you just give investors an update on the company's business, the company's business model and how that's changed?
00:00:37
Speaker
Of course, yeah. So as you said, we're the world's largest open business. customer feedback platform. What does that mean? It means that you can go on to Trustpilot right now and you can record your experience. You can leave feedback on your experience with any business with whom um you've been a customer and some way, shape or form.
Business Model and Revenue Streams
00:00:58
Speaker
What that means is we're collecting a huge amount of feedback ah from a vast range of businesses right across the world.
00:01:06
Speaker
And what we can see, particularly with AI now, is there's huge value in that feedback. So businesses learn a huge amount from it. They can use it to grow faster, they can use it to learn lessons and become better businesses. We make money from subscriptions, so businesses pay us for the ability to use our brand in their own advertising or on their own websites. They pay us for analytics tools, they pay us for the ability to operationalize feedback collection and automate feedback collection. So there's a bunch of things they're paying us for.
00:01:39
Speaker
We have a very large consumer audience, but we're not really monetizing the consumer. We're not an advertising business. We're a subscription business built off a huge amount of proprietary data.
00:01:51
Speaker
And there is more and more of that data coming in every day. We get about 200,000 new bits of feedback are written on Trustpilot every weekday. We got 62 million reviews last year. 20% up year and year. So we're getting huge amount of feedback coming in and that's really where the value resides.
Growth Strategy and Enterprise Focus
00:02:10
Speaker
Interesting. and And that's obviously translating to growth. um you know Last year, your bookings grew 18%. You saw margin expansion. Can you talk through the cake that i guess the key levers that are driving that growth? There's three big things I'd highlight that that that are driving that. The first is I joined Trustpilot in 2023 and said we're going to focus on the high end, so on large enterprise customers. That was the first key driver of that growth. so We saw the number of businesses on Trustpilot paying us more than
00:02:42
Speaker
double the average, so more than $20,000 a year, was up by 35% year and year. That's now our largest customer segment. And all of the economics, ah all of the different economic indicators of that segment are better than than um lower end customers. So a lot of our growth is coming from those large enterprise clients. They cover a huge range of industries. So some of the businesses we talked about, in our earnings presentation that we won in 2025 include you Liberty Mutual, a huge insurance business, and ah Wayfair, we've got technology businesses, travel businesses. So a lot of very large companies around the world realizing they can get closer to their customers using
Impact of AI on Engagement and Visibility
00:03:26
Speaker
Trustpilot. Second big thing was AI. So we saw a surge in the citations of Trustpilot reviews on large language models. That's making more and more businesses realise that they want to engage and be very active on our platform. So AI has been a real tailwind behind the business, particularly in the second half of last year. We can really see that accelerating. The number of um visits that we're getting on Trustpilot from AI tools was up by something like 15 times a year in years. So huge increase in AI.
Market Expansion in the US
00:03:58
Speaker
And then the third thing is growth in the US. So we're a Danish founded business, Danish headquartered, but listed on London Stock Exchange. We've always had a huge presence in Europe, but we've been in the US now for the last 10 years or so. And that was our fastest growing market. It's about 20% our revenue overall, but it' we we grew bookings in the US by 21% year in year and we can see a huge surge in interest in our brand because there isn't really anything like Trustpilot in the US.
00:04:29
Speaker
Interesting.
Trust and AI in Managing Reviews and Profiles
00:04:30
Speaker
and then And then turning to trust, you you're ah you're an open platform, you're funded by the corporates. um And you've put a lot of work, you've got a lot of data to show how you are um growing that trust and you're working, improving those those mechanisms within the business. um Yeah. can you Can you talk about how you are dealing with and improving the your ability to manage trust and improve trust? Yeah. So first of all, I mean, it's absolutely vital to us. Millions of people are trusting Trustpilot to be a place where they can go and read about other people's experiences with businesses and ah see real stuff, real human experiences, not you know fake content or the kind of stuff that you might find on social media. So I think we have a very important role to play as a kind of governed system, not not controlled by companies. It's ultimately up to consumers what ends up on Trustpilot, but also not the wild west of social media where anything goes and it could get the the loudest voices get the most followers and it can be very hard to know what to believe. So we have a very important role to play
00:05:40
Speaker
um It isn't easy to get it right when you have as much feedback coming in as we do, but we do a huge amount with AI to protect the platform and ensure that the the content is trustworthy. In 2025, we removed 7.8 million fake reviews from Trustpilot. That was something like 70% increase year-on-year. So we're doing a huge amount to be proactive and protect the platform. We also take businesses off the platform, or put warnings on their profiles where we have concerns about the way that businesses are interacting with Trustpilot. So there's a lot that we do um and all of the decisions that we make about this stuff are taken within us, within Trustpilot. by the team of our Chief Trust Officer, which is effectively our General Counsel, um so someone called Shehzadi Stinton, and it's her team that's really governing the platform and making these decisions about what stays up, what gets taken down. So we have a clear kind of church and state separation with the commercial organizations.
AI Tools and Enhanced Review Visibility
00:06:43
Speaker
and And turning it towards AI, this is quite an astonishing um sort of statistic that Trustpilot is the fifth most cited domain in ChatGPT. And obviously, we're seeing a huge change in the way people are accessing information people are buying.
00:06:59
Speaker
um Can you talk about i guess your your your actual attitude and how you're adapting towards this fundamental change in in in behaviors? Absolutely. so We've taken the view that we're an open platform and therefore the reviews that are on Trustpilot, we want them to be accessible to the leading large language models. So ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, all of them can access the Trustpilot reviews and display them through their own through their own surfaces, and through the large language models. we That's what led to, so we've opened up our reviews for training, for inference by the leading LLMs and that's what led to a surge, as you say, in the volume of times that Trustpilot is being cited
00:07:48
Speaker
by these tools. Now the reason we're doing that is because our whole job as a company is to collect feedback from users and then to make it useful and to make it have an impact out there in the world. So we don't want, you know, if Dan comes and leaves feedback on Trustpilot, we don't want you to be shouting into a vacuum. We want that to be consumed and useful and having an impact out there in the world. So the more surfaces we can find to do that, the more ways that technology opens up to do that, the better.
00:08:19
Speaker
And all of that is helping our customers because if you're a business who's really kind of invested time and energy in our platforming, generating huge volumes of feedback, you want to see that feedback showing up where users have relevant questions. So, you know, all CMOs at the moment and CEOs are thinking, how is my business going to show up in ChatGBT? used to worry about SEO, now I have to worry about GEO or AEO. Well, Trustpilot is a very important part of the answer to that question. And that's why I think these these numbers show.
00:08:54
Speaker
It's a fascinating statistic. um And turning towards, i guess, the other side of the AI deployment argument, um you've upgraded your margin guidance. How much of that is due to your ability and your use of AI to improve internal efficiencies?
AI in Internal Efficiencies and Product Releases
00:09:10
Speaker
So we we already had a lot of confidence in our ability to improve margins. I think the best evidence of that is, you know, the year before I joined Trustpilot, 2022, it was a loss-making business. We just reported for 2025, full year, 15.6% EBITDA margins. in the space of three years, we've gone from loss-making to plus 15.6%. What we're saying now is we think we can continue that sort of progression and get to 25% by 2028 and 30% by 2030. we're very confident we can do that because we have a very high margin business, 83% gross margins. So what we're able to do is kind of, as the Americans would say, walk and chew gum at the same time. We can spend more dollars on technology, on sales and marketing as we grow while also delivering for shareholders. We we we grew
00:10:01
Speaker
free cash flow by 173% year-on-year. We grew EBITDA by 69% year-on-year in 2025. So we've shown we can grow well and become more profitable at the same time. Now you ask about the impact of AI.
00:10:17
Speaker
That just makes us more confident in our ability to do it. One illustration yeah on our Business products, um historically for the last couple of years, we've had one major release window in April for our B2B products. This year, 2026, we're planning to have two major release windows, to April and September, um ah because AI is enabling us to build products, to build software much quicker and better than we ever could before.
Data Patterns and Review Authenticity
00:10:46
Speaker
And turning towards, I guess, the more nefarious side of AI, it's it's making fake reviews much more easy to generate. Can you turk cook talk about the work you're putting in to make sure that you are um supporting the protectors and the genuine reviewers and and filtering out the bad actors? Well, the good thing is is helping us to spot patterns in the data that enable us to to do that really well. So you're right to say AI makes it easy to write text, right? yeah We all use AI sometimes to yeah write paragraphs or sentences whatever whatever. AI is great at writing text. But what AI can't do is copy the digital fingerprints of a human being. So when we look at reviews that come into Trustpilot, each one is described by hundreds of different metadata points, things like you know the IP address, the time of day, how long it took to write, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are literally hundreds of them for every review. And what we do is based on all the history that we've got, we look for suspicious patterns in what's coming in. and we use AI to do that, it turns out it's absolutely fantastic at that. We're always developing our our capability, developing new models, improving the models that we've already got. So net-net, I think AI is really helping us to do a better job of this. And that's one of the reasons why we removed so much more content in 2025 than we had in the prior year, because we're able to do this more effectively than ever, thanks to AI. As I said earlier, though, I think the best way to look at this is just to look at in practice, are people finding the content useful? um yeah We had, as an example, we had John Roberts from AOWorld.com, the founder, in a little video in our earnings call.
00:12:35
Speaker
And he was saying yeah he gets his team to look into every review that is not a five star review to understand the underlying causes and and get to the um get to the reason why so that they can become a better business as a result. He wouldn't have his team doing that if the content was fake. It would be a waste of their time. So he doesn't have to do that. He's doing it because the content is genuinely useful.
00:13:00
Speaker
And that tells me that we're doing something right. You mentioned AO there. The enterprise, the growth of your enterprise customers is significant part your growth story. um And you've now seen what, a 43, enterprise customers, 43% of bookings come from customers with um value of what? 20,000 or more.
00:13:22
Speaker
Can you talk about that and um you know i guess the growth of that customer base, but also beyond the growth, are those customers operationalizing Trustpilot and how sticky is that service towards the and to the enterprise customers? Yeah, totally. I'll give you ah an example just from the other day. i mean i was speaking to one of our largest customers in the world, a hugely successful global um ah fashion business.
00:13:48
Speaker
And they were saying
Replacing NPS with Trustpilot Feedback
00:13:50
Speaker
to me that until now they've always asked for NPS feedback from their customers after to placing an order. Now they are replacing that with Trustpilot feedback. And the director of e-commerce was saying to me that the reason they're doing that is that the Trustpilot feedback he knows will help his business to grow because they can use it in their channels to tell people the story of the qualitative service they're providing. And it appears, as we've been discussing, it helps them show up in ChatGPT and in other LLMs. Whereas the MPS tool that they're replacing it with was invisible to all of that. Like consumers, it doesn't help you build trust with people if people can't read the results.
00:14:33
Speaker
ah It's totally invisible to LLMs. So we can see even with large, well-established businesses, this idea of dealing with customer feedback out in the open instead of in a black box is something really powerful. It helps you to drive growth. It helps you to improve customer service because, you know, as per my example from ao earlier, you can actually understand the root causes of issues that you wouldn't otherwise have found out about. But what I also see with, you know, talking to particularly senior people and other CEOs, is they use it to drive accountability through the organization. and If everyone in your company can read what the customers are saying, that's an extremely powerful thing. It doesn't matter what industry you're in, listening to your customers is a really healthy thing. And I think our product, by being public out in the open, it enables businesses to do that in a way that nothing else really does.
00:15:30
Speaker
and Turning towards North America, it's been ah a key part of your your growth strategy for a while. It's your fastest growing geography. yeah um yeah Can you talk about that growth? Are there any particular verticals that are driving that growth? and Then looking looking medium to long term, are there any reasons why your North American margins can't sort of converge on on your margins
Opportunities and Growth in North America
00:15:52
Speaker
in Europe?
00:15:52
Speaker
Yes, so you're absolutely right so It's a huge opportunity. If our US business was as big relative to the economy as the UK, as the UK already is for Trustpilot, it would already be a billion dollar plus um annual recurring revenue business, right? So it's ah it's an absolutely huge opportunity for us in in the US. There isn't anything else quite like Trustpilot in the US economy, astonishingly.
00:16:19
Speaker
um So we are going to be, we already are the Trustpilot of the US and we're going to continue growing fast there and and we can see a lot of evidence now that the brand is becoming better and better known and is is really catching on. You ask about key verticals where we're making progress. So we've always been very successful in high lifetime value services. So I think, for example, of banks, insurance companies, credit card businesses, education businesses, healthcare care businesses, some sectors of tourism and travel, some sectors of retail. So we've got a huge
00:16:56
Speaker
variety of verticals, but there are some particular ones where we've just seen really, really great traction in the US. And we can see that, you know, all of the indicators that we measure for what we call the growth flywheel, which is, know, businesses invite their customers to write feedback on Trustpilot, then more people learn about Trustpilot, they start using it themselves, then more businesses want to use it. That growth flywheel, all of the indicators we can see, show that that's accelerating in the US.
AI as a Central Pillar for Trustpilot
00:17:25
Speaker
So what's coming up? um how you know With all of the innovation that's happening globally, but also within the business, how do you how do you ensure that Trustpilot remains that trusted layer in in interactions between customers and corporate? Well, look, I think if you ask any tech CEO at the moment what's coming up and you're speaking in, where are we, April 2026, they're immediately going to talk about AI. So I will follow that pattern and I will say, what's coming up for us? Well, we're doing huge amount. with AI inside our operations, with AI inside our products, but also that that um crucial thing for Trustpilot, making sure that we are being projected out into the AI tools that everybody is now using. And I think it's our success in doing all of those things that you can already see coming through in our numbers. And I think from an investor perspective, that's a penny that really dropped when we did our full year results just ah a couple of weeks ago. I think investors, what we did was we put in front of people the evidence that Trustpilot is winning as a result of AI. There were a lot of headlines after that saying, you Trustpilot is an ai winner. I think investors can now really appreciate why that is. So we just are going to continue to double down on that.
00:18:43
Speaker
Adrian, many thanks for coming in. Fascinating discussion and really a business and really interesting point in the marketplace right now. Thank you. Great to talk.