Your Brand Has a Trust Score - and It's the Number PR Has Been Missing
Updated: 1 day ago
Measuring Trust: The Crafted Trust Score and Its Impact on Brand Credibility
Crafted's Trust Score is a measure of third-party credibility a brand has built across earned media, expert validation, reviews, awards, SEO + GEO visibility, and executive visibility - benchmarked against its direct competitors.
I’ve spent the earlier part of this year thinking about how earned media truly impacts a brand’s overall trust and marketing efforts. This rumination led to the building and framing of the Crafted Trust Stack™, a communications approach that amplifies earned media’s value through most marketing channels: direct and email marketing, owned properties, social channels, packaging, point of purchase, and search and LLM engines.
These past few months, I’ve been equally determined to find a way to evaluate the impact that earned media truly has on brand trust. Earned media has secured its place at the marketing table, but there was still no way to measure its true impact. By this, I mean a quantifiable number ranking a brand against its competitors versus the usual article count, impressions, and/or ad equivalency that PR tends to rely on.
This led to the design and development of the first Crafted Trust Score engine, a singular measure of how much third-party credibility a brand has built across earned media, expert validation, reviews, and awards, benchmarked against its direct competitors.
Why Trust Suddenly Became a Number We Can Score
For most of my career, “earned media is at the top of the marketing funnel” has been the standard belief about our function, usually by someone who had the power to approve the PR budget. What changed? The internet started scoring trust on our behalf, and we finally began to read the scoreboard.
The first shift came by way of AI answer engines. When ChatGPT, Claude, or Google's AI Overviews decides what to say about your brand, it reads the open web and weighs third-party sources far above anything you published about yourself. Muckrack found that earned media drives 84% of AI citations, so the machine that increasingly narrates your brand to buyers is reading your media coverage.
The second shift has been content saturation. AI has made content nearly free and limitless, which quietly demoted “is this relevant?” and promoted “is this real and credible?” When everyone assumes the review might not be real and the founder quote might be generated, trust and trusted sources become infinitely more valuable.
How the Trust Score Actually Works: The Mechanics of Trust
The Trust Score is the front door to understanding this new way of measuring. On craftedpr.com, you can input your brand and two competitors, and you get back a score for the trust your brand has earned and its Share of Trust stacked against those competitors. This website engine is less sophisticated than our in-house version because it’s based on publicly pulled data versus client data pulled from our marketing tools, but the culled-down version is surprisingly accurate.
Here’s what it looks at:
Trust-weighted earned media. The old way counts placements, impressions, and ad-value equivalents - as if a mention in an industry piece carries the same weight as a tested-and-recommended review in a publication your buyer actually trusts. We don't just count coverage; we weight it. Every placement is scored on the authority of the outlet, the sentiment, how prominently your brand features, and more.
AI discoverability. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google, or Google's AI which brand or product in your category is best, are you in the “best of” lists those engines quietly pull from? We measure your presence in the exact places buyers now check before they ever reach your site. A brand the machines don't cite is invisible in the fastest-growing part of the funnel.
Awards. Third-party awards are credibility a brand can't hand itself. We factor in the recognition your work has actually won because a competitive, judged award carries a weight no impression ever will. A focused submissions calendar is one of the most underrated ways to build trust on purpose.
Executive visibility. Trust attaches not just to logos but to people. We measure how present your leaders are where it counts: keynote stages, expert quotes, and a bylined POV. A named, quoted executive puts a human face on the brand that a competitor can't buy its way past.
Share of trust. Your score gets plotted against the named competitors you're fighting for the same buyer, with the cohort average drawn as a line. Above it, you're leading, and everyone else is paying to catch up. Below it, you're paying for someone else's visibility. It turns “we got some great coverage” into “we own more of our category's trust than the two rivals outspending us” - which is a very different sentence to say to a board.
Paid isn't included on purpose because trust is earned, not bought. And because trust moves, the score shifts with time. The same brand dashboard runs month over month, so we see the direction it's heading, whether building or slipping.
What a Brand Trust Score Is and Isn’t
One thing that a brand trust score isn’t is a trust survey.
You've seen the big yearly trust studies that tell you how much the public trusts business, media, NGOs, or CEOs in the abstract. They're an extremely useful report for the global economy, but they aren’t something you can act on Monday morning because they aren't about you.
The Trust Score is the opposite. It's your brand scored against the specific competitors you're winning and losing deals to, based on credibility you earn: who cited you, who validated you, and what the search and AI engines are repeating back.
A New Standard for Measuring PR
We’re excited about the Trust Stack and Trust Score because it moves the industry forward, quantifying earned media and trust in a way that has not yet been done.
In three years, my hope is that “what's our Trust Score, and where's it trending?” will be as normal a question in a marketing review as “what's our CAC?” - and that it will get asked by the CEO and CFO, not just the comms lead.
The brands that win in this AI-answer era will be the ones who aren’t looking at earned media as a volume game but instead as a strategic marketing function with end goals in mind. This includes not only targeting the sources being cited to build their Trust Score but extending earned media trust across every other marketing channel to ensure their Trust Stack is optimized.
What’s Next: Earned Media’s True Impact
We have come a long way. But we still have so far to go.
The true value of PR will be known when that measurement also takes the Trust Stack into account: reviews shared in direct emails, “as seen in” scroll bars on websites, great stories shared on brand socials, and awards showcased on product packaging and point-of-purchase displays. No UMV captures this.
Earned media is the true engine - and load-bearing layer - of marketing. It’s time to start investing in proving this.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a brand trust score?
A brand trust score is a single measure of the third-party credibility a brand has earned, across press, expert validation, reviews, AI citations, and awards, benchmarked against its direct competitors. It turns scattered coverage into one number you can track month over month and defend in a budget review.
How is a trust score different from share of voice?
Share of voice counts how often you're mentioned. A trust score weighs whether those mentions come from credible, independent sources a buyer won't discount for self-interest. Volume without credibility inflates share of voice; a trust score corrects for it by measuring earned credibility, not raw mention count.
What does the Crafted Trust Score measure?
The Crafted Trust Score weighs three things: trust-weighted earned media (scored on outlet authority, sentiment, and prominence), visibility in AI and search results, and competitive Share of Trust against named rivals. The public tool scores brands now; the in-house engine tracks the trend month over month.
Why does earned media matter more in the age of AI?
AI answer engines weight independent, third-party sources far above brand-owned copy. Muck Rack found earned media accounts for 84% of all AI citations. When a machine decides what to say about your brand, it's most often reading press coverage, not the copy you wrote about yourself.
Can earned media really be measured?
Yes. The claim that it can't predates digital attribution. Each input now has a real output: the authority and sentiment of your coverage, your citation rate across AI answers and search, and your Share of Trust versus competitors. Oh, and let’s not forget Amazon and affiliate sales attribution - brand partners who give agencies insight into these insights make their PR engine work even better for them.
How is a brand trust score different from an annual trust study?
An annual trust study measures how much the public trusts institutions - business, media, government - in the abstract, once a year. A brand trust score measures the credibility of a specific brand, scored against its direct competitors and updated continuously. One reads the climate; the other reads a brand’s own numbers.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a brand trust score?
A brand trust score is a single measure of the third-party credibility a brand has earned, across press, expert validation, reviews, AI citations, and awards, benchmarked against its direct competitors. It turns scattered coverage into one number you can track month over month and defend in a budget review.
How is a trust score different from share of voice?
What does the Crafted Trust Score measure?
The Crafted Trust Score weighs three things: trust-weighted earned media (scored on outlet authority, sentiment, and prominence), visibility in AI and search results, and competitive Share of Trust against named rivals. The public tool scores brands now; the in-house engine tracks the trend month over month.
Why does earned media matter more in the age of AI?
AI answer engines weight independent, third-party sources far above brand-owned copy. Muck Rack found earned media accounts for 84% of all AI citations. When a machine decides what to say about your brand, it's most often reading press coverage, not the copy you wrote about yourself.
Can earned media really be measured?
Yes. The claim that it can't predates digital attribution. Each input now has a real output: the authority and sentiment of your coverage, your citation rate across AI answers and search, and your Share of Trust versus competitors. Oh, and let’s not forget Amazon and affiliate sales attribution - brand partners who give agencies insight into these insights make their PR engine work even better for them.
How is a brand trust score different from an annual trust study?
An annual trust study measures how much the public trusts institutions - business, media, government - in the abstract, once a year. A brand trust score measures the credibility of a specific brand, scored against its direct competitors and updated continuously. One reads the climate; the other reads a brand’s own numbers.
