Mindset shift: How to become the answer in AI search

After attending Money20/20 USA, our Chief Customer Officer Alicia Skubick puts forward three strategic priorities for powering trust and visibility in the age of AI.

Money20/20, hosted this year in Las Vegas, is the perfect place to glimpse the future. Sadly, not at the roulette wheel or the blackjack table, but in the ever-changing world of fintech. This year, I had the pleasure of hosting a breakfast there for leaders across that landscape and the question on everyone’s mind was: 

How do we get ahead of the curve and stay there when customer and buyer behavior is transforming so rapidly?

It’s something we’ve been thinking about non-stop this year, as we saw AI systems continue to evolve from simple search engines to complex answer engines. In fact, 58% of consumers now replace traditional search tools with answer engines for product or service recommendations – quite the leap from 25% in 2023.

As a result, the rules of brand visibility and trust too are fundamentally changing. To stay ahead, we need to embrace this evolution from SEO to AEO – Answer Engine Optimization. This requires a shift in how we approach visibility when the consumer journey includes AI systems.

In this environment, it then becomes a brand's job to teach AI systems what it stands for, repeatedly and across multiple domains. Trustpilot data plays a unique role here; as the world’s largest open customer feedback platform, it provides structured customer stories that can help answer engines understand how real consumers describe, evaluate, and experience your brand.

Here’s our checklist for mastering visibility and trust in the AI-enabled buyer journey.

Content that answers, not just attracts

We’ve seen that AI systems prioritize material with genuine depth, originality, and human insight. This type of content powers comprehensive and trustworthy zero-click answers, shortening their journey. 

AI systems summarize and synthesize information, and the brands that surface in their answers are those that act as true educators. Your content must be built to answer customer questions directly. Verified consumer reviews on platforms like Trustpilot become living proof points: authentic, continuously refreshed content that validates your brand’s claims.

How to show up in AI search:

• Build a portfolio of first-party, insight-rich content that directly answers real customer questions.

• Use Trustpilot review data to generate new content ideas for your FAQ and product pages, expanding your content footprint.

• Refresh existing material into question-based and “how/why” formats.

• Use FAQs, explainer videos, diagrams, and customer Q&As to create conversational content.

By following these suggestions, your content is more likely to be cited, not just crawled, by an answer engine.

Presence beyond your own channels

Visibility in the AI era is no longer about page rank; it’s about brand recognition across the web. Answer engines learn from a range of trustworthy, third-party signals. To ensure your brand is being understood and trusted by AI, you need to strengthen your presence on authoritative, external platforms. Like your Trustpilot profile, for instance.

Public, structured, and continuously updated with reviews, your profile is one of the most important external signals AI systems take into account. It provides a credible, external view of your brand for AI systems to recognize and reinforce. In fact, our internal data has shown that Trustpilot’s ChatGPT citations increased 246% in just 3 months.

How to show up in AI search:

• Expand your brand presence across authoritative third-party sites, including review platforms (like Trustpilot), community forums, and industry blogs.

• Audit and optimize your Trustpilot profile: complete all company information and company description to improve how AIs index your brand. Go further by adding details about how to connect, customer service channels, and company history to add a human tone and make your brand come alive.

• Showcase trust signals (like Trustpilot stars and reviews) throughout your website, apps, and campaign media.

• Audit factual consistency: Ensure your brand details match across your site, Trustpilot, and all other listings.

• For more suggestions on how to optimize your Trustpilot account see this help center article.

The result? A wider, richer footprint that teaches AI to trust your brand, anchored in verified, public credibility.

Agility over perfection

The AI landscape changes weekly, meaning the “campaign” mindset is now more liability than asset. Companies that treat content like an annual campaign will always lag behind those that treat it like a heartbeat. Moving to continuous, insight-driven content generation is a vital part of your organization staying responsive to customer feedback and emerging themes in real time.

How to show up in AI search:

• Move from annual content calendars to rolling 2-4 week sprints.

• Use Trustpilot’s analytics to identify emerging customer themes and quickly turn them into new content.

• Measure what truly matters: Citations, mentions, and AI visibility – not just clicks.

• Merge your SEO and content teams into a single “Answers Quality” function.

If you take both human feedback and how the answer engine behaves, you can stay ahead of the trends and give your customers the content they want before they know they want it.

Key takeaways

If there’s one thing that my time in Las Vegas confirmed, it’s that AI search is here to stay. Those with strong Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) strategies will not only survive the transition but will thrive – with trust helping power that visibility at every stage. 

Discover more about how AEO is changing the search landscape for brands.