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🛹 The Wikipedia Paradox: Fully Editable, Fully Trusted. Seven rules, one encyclopedia, and a lesson every founder can steal.
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Something I’ll never understand is the bootlicking toadyism with which the United States treats Putin (and Kim Jong Un). You want to show some level of respect to your counterpart when engaging in diplomacy, but there’s no prize for being the most sycophantic person in the room.

All while the same administration wages economic war against Canada. It’s as if up is down, black is white, and night is day. It’ll be interesting to see what happens come 2028. I guess until then I’ll just have to pinch my nose and get on with it. Onwards!

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Adrian Blair, CEO at Trustpilot

Adrian Blair is the CEO of Trustpilot, the world's largest open customer feedback platform, which now holds over 400 million reviews and around 60 million monthly active users. Trustpilot is listed on the London Stock Exchange and posted $261.1M in revenue in 2025. He took the job in September 2023, succeeding founder Peter Holten Mühlmann, and arrived with a career built almost entirely on scaling other people's marketplaces. He joined Google in 2004 out of Harvard Business School, where he picked up the OKR habit he still runs at Trustpilot today. Then came seven years as Global COO of Just Eat, from 2011 to 2018, during which he helped take the company from a loss-making startup to a FTSE 100 business generating over £170M in EBITDA. From 2019 to 2022, he was CEO of Dext, a SaaS accounting automation platform, where the company tripled its worldwide user base.

Trustpilot spent nearly two decades building a moat around a single asset: the belief that its reviews are real. Then the internet filled up with content that nobody could trace back to a human, and every feedback platform on earth inherited a credibility problem it hadn't had in 2019. Adrian bets that this makes Trustpilot's archive more valuable, because genuine human experience is now the scarce thing. The numbers suggest he's onto something. In January, Trustpilot was ranked the fifth-most-cited domain on ChatGPT, and the company is leaning into it hard. What makes him worth reading is that he's also the rare public-company CEO who will tell you he doesn't want your AI-written memo because he can't tell whose judgment he's reading. The man running the world's largest trust infrastructure is betting the company on AI, while quietly refusing to let it make the call that matters.

What does online trust mean in 2026 for Trustpilot?

Trust has always been important in the world and in business. For as long as there have been human beings, there has been trust. And, when you think about it, trust is a very personal thing. It is something we as individuals decide for ourselves. No one can tell Bill who Bill should trust. Only Bill can decide that. You make that decision with your head and with your heart. It is not pure calculation. Two plus two equals four, and you don't need trust to know that. But who Bill chooses to trust is a heart thing as well as a head thing. Part calculation, part emotion.

So how do people build trust? There are three things. First, you trust businesses that are transparent about problems. If something didn't go well, tell me about it. Don't try to cover it up; don't try to hide it. The second is credibility. Businesses have to actually deliver on their promises. Otherwise, why should you trust them? And the third is personal respect. They need to treat you as an individual rather than as a member of a group. They need to actually care about Bill, not just see you as a particular demographic or whatever. Those ways of building trust are timeless. The question now is how AI changes them. How does the way businesses build trust with people change in the age of AI?

Our role in that is really important. Trustpilot is the world's largest open customer feedback platform, which means you can share feedback about any business you have genuinely experienced. You don't need to be invited. The business doesn't have to give you permission. In fact, if the business isn't on Trustpilot at all, you can create it yourself and go and leave them feedback. It is the ultimate transparent feedback platform, and that is an extremely powerful thing if a business is serious about building trust with people. So for us, trust in the age of AI is about using new technology to help businesses build trust with their customers and to understand that trust more deeply and more profoundly than ever before.

Do you think it's more difficult to build trust today?

I think in general it is more difficult. There is so much content out there in the world, and you don't really know what sits behind it. You don't know if it was written by AI. You don't know if there is a real human experience there. Some social media platforms are pretty ungoverned spaces too, where people get lots of followers and message whatever they want to.

All of that makes what we are doing at Trustpilot a very important space, because we are not an ungoverned social media platform. We have very strict rules about what is and is not acceptable, from businesses and from consumers, and we have a team whose job it is to govern those rules. That is what makes the platform useful for consumers. If someone claims to have a 4.9 rating on Trustpilot, you can come to Trustpilot and check whether that is actually true. We are the place where people submit the feedback, so we have the canonical source of all that information. You can find the truth through that, and then make your own decision about who you want to trust.

But AI is making what we do more powerful, because it lets us get that content out across new surfaces. We have always shown up hugely on Google search results. You see a lot of Trustpilot reviews, and we get about 5 billion impressions on Google every month. Now our content is appearing in ChatGPT, in Claude, in Perplexity, and the others. These are new surfaces where the feedback comes to life and gets projected. And we love that, because we want the feedback on Trustpilot to have as much influence as possible out there in the world.

How much weight does Trustpilot hold in AI search results?

There are various measures around. In January this year, we were ranked the number-five domain globally for ChatGPT citations. So we are right up there with the likes of Wikipedia and Reddit, who I think are at the top. We are getting cited an incredible amount. The reason for that is twofold. The first is that what we have is incredibly useful and unique. We have over 400 million reviews on Trustpilot, with people recording their experiences with businesses, and that content doesn't exist anywhere else. So if you are an LLM and you want to give the user the most useful answer to their query, you must take advantage of it.

The second is that we are really leaning into it. We want this to happen. We want to be the best place for you to leave feedback as a consumer, and if you know your feedback will be heard and read in all kinds of places, that's all the more reason to leave it on Trustpilot. So we have leaned into these platforms and are keen to see our content adopted more.

What does your day-to-day look like as CEO?

I have always been very structured about how I use time. I am a former COO. I was Chief Operating Officer at Just Eat, the food delivery platform, for seven years, and ever since I started that job, I have had to maintain a very structured week.

Generally, I do a lot of internal meetings on Mondays and Tuesdays. I have one-to-ones with my direct reports and a weekly executive team meeting for a couple of hours. On Wednesdays and Thursdays, I travel. We are a very global business. We are headquartered in Copenhagen, with large teams in London and New York, as well as in Denver, Amsterdam, Milan, Hamburg, Edinburgh, and Melbourne. We are distributed across a lot of places, so on those two days I will physically be out there with one of those teams. Then on Fridays I try to do more external stuff. It is always important to me to talk directly to customers, and I try to have at least one customer call every week to learn more about them and how they use Trustpilot. But as CEO of a public company, there is always a lot of external stuff you need to do as well.

The really critical thing for anyone in one of these senior positions is that you stay in touch with the front line. For me, that starts with the customer. It is actually our first value at Trustpilot. So it matters that I am talking to our customers directly. But it is also the frontline employees, whether that is the engineers writing the code, the marketing people creating the creative, or the salespeople and customer success managers having those customer interactions. I’m always very keen to be out there with them, knowing those people and knowing the challenges they face every day. Because as a senior person, the more layers you end up with between yourself and those frontline folks, the greater the risk that you just lose touch and exist in a bubble.

What goal-setting frameworks do you use?

I joined Google in 2004, and Google was an early adopter of OKRs. These days, more than 20 years later, I think it’s very, very common in tech. But ever since then, it has just been part of my daily bread at work. At every company I have been in, we either had OKRs when I joined, or the first thing I did was implement them. So that is basically what we do at Trustpilot. We work on a quarterly cadence, and our financial year is the calendar year, so it’s very easy to get your head around the planning cycle.

How do the OKRs move from top-down and bottom-up?

I think it is very important to have unifying OKRs across the organization because most things that really matter can't be accomplished by a single function on its own. We have a series of overarching goals, and we call them ‘trust musts’, because it rhymes and we are called Trustpilot. We have a few of them for the year, and everyone in the business knows what they are.

We keep them consistent for the whole calendar year because, if they are sufficiently big and meaty, you can't accomplish everything in a quarter, and that consistency helps everyone really get behind them. So we have company-wide goals, which are these trust musts, and then of course you also have to have functional objectives, because there will be a lot of things that are very important but don't ladder up directly into one of those overall company goals.

The difficult thing is to not end up with way too much. The default state as a company grows is that you just add more and more and more complexity and never take anything away, and then you end up with people who are confused and tired. It is like I said about the front line. The default is that you lose touch unless you try extremely hard not to. And the default is that you end up with way too many OKRs unless you are actually working really hard to stop it.

Do you have any cultural rules you hold dear?

I’ll tell you one of the most important ones—and I often draw this framework on a whiteboard for people when they first join the company. I always have an inverted triangle in mind. At the very top, outside the triangle and above the whole thing, you have the customer. That is the most important person. Below that, running across the top of the triangle, you have the front line of the organization. And right at the bottom, you have the CEO, with various layers of management in between.

I think that is a helpful way to think about any company. First of all, it gives you an appropriate sense of humility as a leader that ultimately you are there to serve. Your only means of serving the customer is to serve the front line, because you are not doing things for the customer yourself. The front line is. So that’s a pretty fundamental place to start. If leaders have some other idea, my job is to serve my boss, which is typically the human instinct, then you end up with a completely inverted sense of what you are actually there to do.

Now, if you have worked in tech for a long time, you have an acute sense of pace and urgency. The world changes incredibly fast. Companies that don't get the program get killed very quickly. You have to have a rapid heartbeat. I always think in terms of the heartbeat of a mouse, not the heartbeat of an elephant. You need quick cycle times. I love the Jeff Bezos thing of type one and type two decisions. Some of those can't be reversed, so you have to be incredibly careful. The vast majority of decisions are reversible, though. You don't have to sweat about getting tons and tons more data before you decide. You can often just move, and that bias toward action speeds up cycle times. So pace and urgency matter a lot.

Maybe a final one for me is that when you work in tech, the most important thing is actually the product itself. You can have the best sales organization in the world, but if the product is not as good as someone else's, you are going to get killed. You have to be really clear about what your product value is, what you are doing for customers, and whether you are actually the best at it. That is where it all starts.

How are you using AI operationally at Trustpilot?

We are using it all over the place. Obviously, we are coding with it—I think everyone is doing that now. We use Claude Code in engineering, and the finance team is all using it as well. We have got a lot of use cases in customer experience now too, but we are really encouraging the whole organization to innovate in their own area. And as I mentioned, with that frontline focus, it is often the folks who are closest to the front line who come up with the best ideas.

Any use case that really stood out?

Within customer care, being able to take the customer to something helpful, to the right bit of content, much more quickly than was possible in the past. And within finance, some of the analysis we can now do at a far more rapid pace than was ever possible before. I think that kind of thing is interesting.

The one I don't appreciate is content where people have basically had a paper written by AI. I think we have all got to be a bit careful with that, because, of course, it will sound terribly clever and intelligent, but ultimately I want to know what the actual judgment of the person who wrote it is. And I do wonder sometimes, when I get stuff, whether this is your judgment or is this Claude's.

How do you get the best out of yourself?

The ability to compartmentalize is very important. Certainly, if you are the CEO of a company, at any given point there are all kinds of things on your plate that, if you wanted to, you could lie awake stressing about. You have to have the discipline to switch off. To be fully engaged when you need to be engaged, but also, in my case, to be fully with the kids or fully with my wife when I am not at work. Just as I am not sitting in a board of directors meeting texting my wife, I shouldn't be sitting with my wife texting the board of directors.

You also have to stay in shape. I would find it very hard to do this job if I didn't get enough exercise, sleep reasonably well, and all that kind of thing. It is a cliché, but it really is a marathon, not a sprint. You want to be doing these jobs for many, many years, not show up for a couple of years with a lot of energy and then burn out. You have to work sustainably.

But it starts with having a sense of what you are trying to achieve and really believing in it. I think that is the best motivator of all, because it is the one that keeps you going when times are hard. A lot of other motivators might fizzle out, but if you have really got that belief in your company's mission, that will carry you through thick and thin over the years.

Extra reading

• Spotlight every product: Getting AI recommended in the new search era - August, 2026

• Trustpilot just partnered with Shopify to put its reviews where AI search engines are already looking - June, 2026

• How Trustpilot drives trust, affinity and conversion rates - September, 2025

And that’s it! You can follow Adrian on LinkedIn or check out Trustpilot on their website to keep up with what they’re building!

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Mochary Method—an executive coaching firm that specializes in helping growing startups.

See the full set of tools we use inside Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

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