TrustRank
TrustRank is a method for spotting web spam, described in a 2004 paper by researchers at Stanford University and Yahoo. People hand-pick a small set of reputable seed pages. Trust then flows out along their links, on the paper's observation that good pages seldom link to bad ones, and it fades the further a page sits from the seeds.
Source: Gyöngyi, Garcia-Molina and Pedersen, Combating Web Spam with TrustRank (VLDB 2004), checked October 29, 2026
What TrustRank means for your business
TrustRank came out of Stanford and Yahoo, not Google. In a December 2011 post on Google's German webmaster blog, a transcript of a Matt Cutts video, Google said trust is a catch-all word it uses, that PageRank is one kind of it and good links build it, and that it has nothing specifically called trust rank. Google's current guide to its ranking systems doesn't list TrustRank.
So we wouldn't chase a TrustRank score, because Google doesn't publish one. Any trust score you see in an SEO tool is that company's own estimate.
The paper's starting point still makes sense for a small business. Its authors noted that good pages can be tricked into linking to spam, like an unmoderated message board. A link from a site that's careful about what it links to says more about you than one from a site that links to anyone. Our link spam entry lists the links Google counts as spam.
If someone sold you a trust or authority score and promised to raise it, we'll show you what Google itself says it looks at.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview said TrustRank's ideas are widely used by Google, citing SEO blogs and Wikipedia rather than any Google page. ChatGPT cited the paper and Ahrefs, and said there's no public Google TrustRank score.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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