What is AI Trust Signals?

“In the Answer Economy, you don’t get a click. You are the answer.”

AI Trust Signals is a diagnostic platform that quantifies your brand's authority and credibility to the AI systems your buyers now trust for answers. It analyzes your entire digital footprint to generate a single metric: the Trust Signal Score.

This is a comprehensive platform that solves a problem no SEO, CRM, or analytics tool currently addresses. It quantifies your brand's trust footprint across dozens of AI-readable signals and provides a detailed, actionable roadmap for increasing brand visibility. It's like PageRank and Page Authority, but rebuilt for the AI Answer Economy, where buyer intent starts inside a chatbot, not Google.

​

Why Trust Signals Matter

In the post-SEO landscape, visibility is no longer about ranking; it's about being recommended. AI models, which now mediate most buyer discovery, prioritize brands with clear, verifiable credibility and trustworthiness. They need to protect their own credibility, and if they suggest a brand that is not trustworthy, the model loses user trust. This makes Trust Signals the new backlinks for the AI era.

"Google rewards relevance. AI rewards trust."

​

​

Patrick's Core Frameworks

Patrick's work is built on a simple premise: The companies that win the next decade won't be those with the best AI tools, but those who dare to think differently about trust and transparency. His core frameworks are designed to help you become one of those companies.

​

• Answer Rank: This is the definitive framework for brand visibility in AI-generated answers. It analyzes brand inclusion, trust signal coverage, sentiment, and topical authority to model how LLMs decide what brands to recommend.

• Trust Signals: Co-developed with Marcus Sheridan, this framework identifies the key signals that influence AI's decision-making and correlates them to visibility outcomes. These signals are categorized into three tiers—Essential, Elevating, and Enhancing—to provide a clear path to building unshakeable authority in your market.

​

​

The Sovereign CMO: A Consulting Practice

Through The Sovereign CMO, Patrick works exclusively with two types of clients: small business owners who are market leaders, and high-growth B2B SaaS companies. In each engagement, the Trust Signals framework is not just a theory, it's the definitive roadmap for optimizing their marketing and content operations.

​

For Small Businesses: Translating Reputation into Authority

You've built a business on trust, hard work, and a stellar reputation. Your challenge is translating that hard-earned credibility into a powerful digital presence. The Trust Signals framework provides a clear path.

Patrick’s consulting work with small businesses focuses on transforming their existing knowledge and client relationships into a system for building AI-native authority. He audits their digital footprint using the Trust Signals Index, uncovers hidden opportunities in their content, and builds a strategic plan to:
 

• Dominate the local AI landscape: By optimizing for essential signals like NAP consistency and pricing transparency, he ensures your business is the clear, trustworthy choice for AI recommendations in your local market.

• Turn expertise into content: He helps teams formalize their expertise into AI-readable content, leveraging the Big 5 framework to answer customer questions and establish your brand as a definitive source of information.

• Measure what matters: He installs a system for tracking the new metrics of the AI Answer Economy, allowing business owners to see how their efforts directly translate into AI visibility and inbound leads.

​

​

For VC-Backed SaaS Companies: Building a Defensible Moat

​

In the high-stakes world of SaaS, you're in a race for market share. Your content needs to move beyond generic thought leadership and become the infrastructure that AI models rely on. The Trust Signals framework is your blueprint for creating a defensible semantic moat.
 

Patrick's work with SaaS leaders is a high-impact, sprint-based approach to:

• Secure first-mover advantage: He helps teams redesign their content architecture for LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization), ensuring their brand's wisdom is embedded into AI responses long before competitors even realize the game has changed.

• Align content with the buyer’s journey: He works with sales and marketing teams to create content that answers the nuanced, high-intent questions buyers are asking in LLMs, shortening sales cycles and accelerating pipeline velocity.

• Future-proof the brand: By systematically improving elevating and enhancing trust signals—from advanced schema to authoritative outbound citations—he builds a brand so credible to AI, it becomes impossible to ignore in the new search landscape.