Trustpilot Group plc (TRST) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to Edison TV. Today, I'm speaking to Adrian Blair, who is Chief Executive Officer at Trustpilot, a U.K.-listed business who are the world's leading open access customer referral platform. Adrian, thanks for joining me today.

Great to be here.

And starting off by introducing Trustpilot. Obviously, your business has evolved quite a lot over the last few years. Can you just give investors an update on the company's business -- the company's business model and how that's changed?

Of course, yes. So as you said, we're the world's largest open customer feedback platform. What does that mean? It means that you can go on to Trustpilot right now and you can record your experience, you can leave feedback on your experience with any business with whom you've been a customer in some way, shape or form. What that means is we're collecting a huge amount of feedback from a vast range of businesses right across the world. And what we can see, particularly with AI now is there's huge value in that feedback. So businesses learn a huge amount from it. They can use it to grow faster. They can use it to learn lessons and become better businesses. We make money from subscriptions. So businesses pay us for the ability to use our brand in their own advertising or on their own websites. They pay us for analytics tools. They pay us for the ability to operationalize feedback collection and automate feedback collection. So there's a bunch of things they're paying us for. We have a very large consumer audience, but we're not really monetizing the consumer. We're not an advertising business. We're a subscription business, built off a huge amount of proprietary data. And there is more and more of that data coming in every day. We get about 200,000 new bits of feedback are written on Trustpilot every weekday. We got 62 million reviews last year, 20% up year-on-year. So we're getting a huge amount of feedback coming in, and that's really where the value resides.

Interesting. And that's obviously translating to growth. Last year, your bookings grew 18%. You saw margin expansion. Can you talk through the -- I guess, the key levers that are driving that growth?

There's 3 big things I'd highlight that are driving that. The first is I joined Trustpilot in 2023 and said we're going to focus on the high end, so on large enterprise customers. That was the first key driver of that growth. So we saw the number of businesses on Trustpilot paying us more than double the average to more than $20,000 a year, was up by 35% year-on-year. That's now our largest customer segment. And all of the economics -- all of the different economic indicators of that segment are better than lower-end customers. So a lot of our growth is coming from those large enterprise clients. They cover a huge range of industries. So some of the businesses we talked about in our earnings presentation that we won in 2025 include Liberty Mutual, a huge insurance business, Wayfair. We've got technology businesses, travel businesses. So a lot of very large companies around the world realizing they can get closer to their customers using Trustpilot. Second big thing was AI. So we saw a surge in the citations of Trustpilot reviews on large language models. That's making more and more businesses realize that they want to engage and be very active on our platform. So AI has been a real tailwind behind the business, particularly in the second half of last year, we can really see that accelerating. The number of visits that we're getting on Trustpilot from AI tools was up by something like 15x year-on-year. So a huge increase in AI. And then the third thing is growth in the U.S. So we're a Danish-founded business, Danish headquartered, but listed on London Stock Exchange. We've always had a huge presence in Europe, but we've been in the U.S. now for the last 10 years or so, and that was our fastest-growing market. It's about 20% of our revenue overall, but it's -- we grew bookings in the U.S. by 21% year-on-year, and we can see a huge surge in interest in our brand because there isn't really anything like Trustpilot in the U.S.

Interesting. And then turning to trust. You're an open platform, you're funded by the corporates. And you've put a lot of work -- you've got a lot of data to show how you are growing that trust and you're working on improving those mechanisms within the business. Yes, can you talk about how you are dealing with and improving your ability to manage trust and improve trust?

Yes. So first of all, I mean, it's absolutely vital to us. Millions of people are trusting Trustpilot to be a place where they can go and read about other people's experiences with businesses and see real stuff, real human experiences, not fake content or the kind of stuff that you might find on social media. So I think we have a very important role to play as a kind of governed system, not controlled by companies. It's ultimately up to consumers, what ends up on Trustpilot, but also not the wild west of social media where anything goes and the loudest voices get the most followers and it can be very hard to know what to believe. So we have a very important role to play. It isn't easy to get it right when you have as much feedback coming in as we do. But we do a huge amount with AI to protect the platform and ensure that the content is trustworthy. In 2025, we removed 7.8 million fake reviews from Trustpilot. That was something like a 70% increase year-on-year. So we're doing a huge amount to be proactive and protect the platform. We also take businesses off the platform, put warnings on their profiles where we have concerns about the way that businesses are interacting with Trustpilot. So there's a lot that we do. And all of the decisions that we make about this stuff are taken within us, within Trustpilot by the team of our Chief Trust Officer, which is effectively our General Counsel. So someone called Shazadi Stinton, and it's her team that's really governing the platform and making these decisions about what stays up, what gets taken down. So we have a clear kind of church and state separation with the commercial organization.

And turning towards AI, it's quite an astonishing sort of statistic that Trustpilot is the fifth most cited domain in ChatGPT. And obviously, we're seeing a huge change in the way people are accessing information, people are buying. Can you talk about, I guess, your attitude and how you're adapting towards this fundamental change in behaviors?

Absolutely. So we've taken the view that we're an open platform and therefore, the reviews that are on Trustpilot, we want them to be accessible to the leading large language models. So ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, all of them can access the Trustpilot reviews and display them through their own surfaces, through the large language models. That's what led to -- so we've opened up our reviews for training, for inference by the leading LLMs. And that's what led to a surge, as you say, in the volume of times that Trustpilot is being cited by these tools. Now the reason we're doing that is because our whole job as a company is to collect feedback from users and then to make it useful and to make it have an impact out there in the world. So we don't want -- if Dan comes and leaves feedback on Trustpilot, we don't want to be shouting into a vacuum. We want that to be consumed and useful in having an impact out there in the world. So the more surfaces we can find to do that, the more ways that technology opens up to do that, the better. And all of that is helping our customers because if you're a business who's really kind of invested time and energy in our platform and generating huge volumes of feedback, you want to see that feedback showing up where users have relevant questions. So all CMOs at the moment and CEOs are thinking how is my business going to show up in ChatGPT. I used to worry about SEO. Now I have to worry about GEO or AEO. Well, Trustpilot is a very important part of the answer to that question. And that's why I think these numbers show.

It's a fascinating statistic. And turning towards, I guess, the other side of the AI deployment argument, you've upgraded your margin guidance. How much of that is due to your ability and your use of AI to improve internal efficiencies?

So we already had a lot of confidence in our ability to improve margins. I think the best evidence of that is the year before I joined Trustpilot 2022, it was a loss-making business. We just reported for 2025 full year 15.6% EBITDA margin. So in the space of 3 years, we've gone from loss-making to plus 15.6%. What we're saying now is we think we can continue that sort of progression and get to 25% by 2028 and 30% by 2030. And we're very confident we can do that because we have a very high-margin business, 83% gross margins. So what we're able to do is kind of as the Americans would say, walk and chew gum at the same time. We can spend more dollars on technology, on sales and marketing as we grow while also delivering for shareholders. We grew free cash flow by 173% year-on-year. We grew EBITDA by 69% year-on-year in 2025. So we've shown we can grow well and become more profitable at the same time. Now you asked about the impact of AI. That just makes us more confident in our ability to do it. One illustration on our business products, historically, for the last couple of years, we've had one major release window in April for our B2B products. This year, 2026, we're planning to have 2 major release windows, April and September because AI is enabling us to build products, to build software much quicker and better than we ever could before.

And turning towards, I guess, the more nefarious side of AI, it's making fake reviews much more easy to generate. Can you talk about the work you're putting in to make sure that you are supporting the protectors and the genuine reviewers and filtering out the bad actors?

Well, the good thing is AI is helping us to spot patterns and the data that enable us to do that really well. So you're right to say AI makes it easy to write text, right? We all use AI sometimes to write paragraphs or sentences or whatever. AI is great at writing text. But what AI can't do is copy the digital fingerprints of a human being. So when we look at reviews that come into Trustpilot, each one is described by hundreds of different metadata points, things like the IP address, the time of day, how long it took to write, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are literally hundreds of them for every review. And what we do is based on all the history that we've got, we look for suspicious patterns in what's coming in. And we use AI to do that. It turns out it's absolutely fantastic at that. We're always developing our capability, developing new models, improving the models that we've already got. So net-net, I think AI is really helping us to do a better job with this. And that's one of the reasons why we removed so much more content in 2025 than we had in the prior year because we're able to do this more effectively than ever, thanks to AI. As I said earlier, though, I think the best way to look at this is just to look at in practice are people finding the content useful. We had -- as an example, we had John Roberts from aoworld.com, the founder in a little video in our earnings call, and he was saying he gets his team to look into every review that it's not a 5-star review to understand the underlying causes and get to the reason why so that they can become a better business as a result. He wouldn't have his team doing that if the content was fake. It will be a waste of their time. So he doesn't have to do that. He's doing it because the content is genuinely useful, and that tells me that we're doing something right.

You mentioned AO there. The enterprise -- the growth of your enterprise customers is a significant part of your growth story. And you've now seen for enterprise customers, 43% of bookings come from customers with value of about $20,000. Yes. Can you talk about that? And I guess, the growth of that customer base, but also beyond the growth, how are those customers operationalizing Trustpilot and how sticky is that service towards -- to the enterprise customers?

Yes, totally. I'll give you an example just from the other day. I mean, I was speaking to one of our largest customers in the world, a hugely successful global fashion business. And they were saying to me that until now, they've always asked for NPS feedback from their customers after placing an order. Now they are replacing that with Trustpilot feedback. And the Director of e-commerce was saying to me that the reason they're doing that is that the Trustpilot feedback he knows will help this business to grow because they can use it in their channels to tell people the story of the quality of service they're providing. And it appears, as we've been discussing, it helps them show up in ChatGPT and in other LLMs, whereas the NPS tool that they're replacing it with was invisible to all of that. Like consumers, it doesn't help you build trust with people if people can't read the results. It's totally invisible to LLMs. So we can see even with large, well-established businesses, this idea of dealing with customer feedback out in the open instead of in the black box is something really powerful. It helps you to drive growth. It helps you to improve customer service because as per my example from AO earlier, you can actually understand the root causes of issues that you wouldn't otherwise have found out about. But what I also see with talking to particularly senior people and other CEOs is they use it to drive accountability through the organization. And if everyone in your company can read what the customers are saying, that's an extremely powerful thing. And it doesn't matter what industry you're in, listening to your customers is a really healthy thing. And I think our product by being public out in the open, it enables businesses to do that in a way that nothing else really does.

And turning towards North America. It's been a key part of your growth strategy for a while. It's your fastest-growing geography. Yes, can you talk about that growth? Are there any particular verticals that are driving that growth? And then looking medium to long term, are there any reasons why your North American margins can't sort of converge on your margins in Europe?

Yes. So you're absolutely right. It's a huge opportunity. If our U.S. business was as big relative to the economy as the U.K. -- as the U.K. already is for Trustpilot, it would already be a $1 billion-plus annual recurring revenue business, right? So it's an absolutely huge opportunity for us in the U.S. There isn't anything else quite like Trustpilot in the U.S. economy astonishingly. So we are going to be -- we already are the Trustpilot in the U.S., and we're going to continue growing fast there. And we can see a lot of evidence now that the brand is becoming better and better known and is really catching on. You asked about key verticals where we're making progress. So we've always been very successful in high lifetime value services. So I think, for example, of banks, insurance companies, credit card businesses, education businesses, health care businesses, some sectors of tourism and travel, some sectors of retail. So we've got a huge variety of verticals, but there are some particular ones where we've just seen really, really great traction in the U.S. And we can see that all of the indicators that we measure for what we call the growth flywheel, which is businesses invite their customers to write feedback on Trustpilot, then more people learn about Trustpilot, they start using it themselves, then more businesses want to use it. That growth flywheel, all of the indicators we can see show that, that's accelerating in the U.S.

So what's coming up? How -- with all of the innovation that's happening globally, but also within the business, how do you ensure that Trustpilot remains that trusted layer in interactions between customers and corporates?

Well, look, I think if you ask any tech CEO at the moment what's coming up and you're speaking in where are we in April 2026, they're immediately going to talk about AI. So I will follow that pattern. And I would say what's coming up for us? Well, we're doing a huge amount with AI inside our operations, with AI inside our products, but also that, that crucial thing for Trustpilot, making sure that we are being projected out into the AI tools that everybody is now using. And I think it's our success in doing all of those things that you can already see coming through in our numbers in 2025. And I think from an investor perspective, that's a penny that really dropped when we did our full year results just a couple of weeks ago. I think investors -- what we did was we put in front of people the evidence that Trustpilot is winning as a result of AI. There were a lot of headlines after that saying Trustpilot is an AI winner. I think investors can now really appreciate why that is. So we just are going to continue to double down on that.

Adrian, many thanks for coming in. Fascinating discussion and really a business at a really interesting point in the marketplace right now.

Thank you.