Methodology
How the TrustGrowth Score works
What the score is
The TrustGrowth Score is one number, 0–100, answering a single question: how much trust and growth has this site earned on the web? It is built to be meaningful for any site, from a domain registered yesterday to a household name — which forces a design decision most site scores dodge. A score that can put a brand-new site in the 70s is not measuring trust; it is measuring craftsmanship. Ours used to. As of August 2026, it no longer does — and this page explains exactly how the number is built, what it can never do, and why we changed it.
The three layers
The headline score is composed of three layers, weighted 55 / 30 / 15:
Standing — 55%. Does the web treat this site as real? Standing is fed by the link graph (referring domains and domain rank, on the rank provider's own conversion curve), by absolute search visibility (the site's actual footprint in search results), and by corroboration (branded search demand and citations in AI answers). Standing cannot be edited into existence. It has to be earned off-site, and it accumulates slowly. That is not a flaw in the measurement; it is the thing being measured.
Integrity — 30%. Is the site well made? Technical health, content (coverage, freshness, actual search use, liveness), on-page E-E-A-T signals, performance, and structure for generative engines. Integrity is fully under the owner's control — and a brand-new site can honestly score 90+ here on day one.
Momentum — 15%. Is standing improving? Measured over 28-day windows with hard volume floors. Below the floors — too little search activity to distinguish signal from noise — momentum does not vote at all; its weight is redistributed rather than filled with a guess.
The contract
Headline ≤ Standing + 25
A site's published score can never run more than 25 points ahead of what the web actually says about it. Integrity may be high on day one; the headline may not. A flawless artifact with no standing can reach at most 25 — the cap is what stops polish from impersonating trust.
Three companion rules are equally binding:
- Unknown is never a number. When we have not measured something, the score card shows it as provisional. Missing evidence does not silently become a mid-scale score.
- A measured zero is a zero. Zero referring domains, actually counted, scores as zero — and the card distinguishes that from "not collected yet."
- Below-floor momentum does not vote. Growth computed on a handful of clicks is noise, so it is omitted, not averaged in.
The bands
| Score | What it means |
|---|---|
| Below 40 | Unknown or early. Most new sites live here — correctly. |
| 40–59 | Foundations in place; little external standing yet. |
| 60–69 | Emerging. Tiers begin at 60. |
| 70–79 | Established — the first deserved 70s. |
| 80–89 | Strong. Uncommon. |
| 90+ | Rare. |
A well-built two-month-old site typically lands in the 20s–30s. That is correct, not a punishment: the web has not yet had time to accumulate evidence about it. What early work moves is Integrity — fully in your control today — and, once search volumes clear the floors, Momentum. Standing follows at the pace the web corroborates you, because that is what standing means.
Why we changed it (August 2026)
In August 2026 we replaced the scoring formula. The old one had three defects, each measurable in its own code:
- 72% of the weight measured how a site looks; only 16% measured what it had earned. Technical polish, on-page signals, and performance — all fixable in a week — dominated the headline. Links, traffic, and mentions barely registered.
- Missing evidence was scored as 50 out of 100. "We know nothing about this site's backlinks" produced a mid-scale number at full weight. Not knowing was worth more points than measuring a zero.
- The scales flattered the bottom. Full authority marks arrived at just 500 referring domains, a nearly-new domain's link rank mapped to 76/100, and a site's content score was actually higher the younger the site was.
The result, on our own product: trustgrowth.ai scored 73 — Silver tier — with zero organic clicks, zero top-100 keywords, and seven referring domains. The public production proof shows that under the current model it scores 32, provisional and with no tier, as of August 15, 2026. Every site on the platform dropped 20–45 points at the cutover. We chose that on purpose, because the alternative was keeping a number that meant nothing.
For context, this is what a roughly two-month-old site scores on the industry's established authority metrics:
| Metric | Typical score at ~2 months |
|---|---|
| Ahrefs Domain Rating | 0 |
| Moz Domain Authority | 1 |
| Semrush Authority Score | ~0 |
| Majestic Trust Flow | 0 |
| SimilarWeb / Tranco rankings | not listed |
Those are not products being harsh; that is what trust means. Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines direct raters to weight what independent external sources say about a site over what the site says about itself. The honest contrast is Lighthouse, where a brand-new site can score 100 — because Lighthouse scores the artifact and says so. Our old formula scored the artifact while calling it trust. The new one separates the two: Integrity is the artifact layer, Standing is the trust layer, and the headline is capped by Standing.
There is precedent for re-baselining loudly rather than quietly: Moz's Domain Authority 2.0 in 2019 retrained the model, dropped many scores overnight, and published the methodology. That is the pattern we are following here.
Continuity and transparency
- History is re-expressed, not erased. Score history is recomputed under the current formula back to June 2026 where source data exists, so your trend line stays comparable across the change.
- Backfilled points are labeled. Recomputed history is marked as backfilled and is not eligible for rankings.
- The formula is versioned. Every published score carries its formula version, and formula changes go through an audited activation trail.
- Provisional means provisional. While the current formula is in its provisional period — and whenever a score is computed from incomplete evidence — the score card says so, in words, next to the number.
Questions we expect
Why did my score drop? The formula changed; your site did not. The old model overweighted qualities every site controls and scored missing evidence as 50/100. Removing those two mechanisms lowers almost every score — including ours. Nothing you built was un-built.
Is a 35 bad? No. Read the band, not the instinct from school grades: below 40 is where most young or lightly-established sites belong. A 35 with high Integrity describes a well-made site the web has not accumulated much evidence about — which is an accurate description of most new sites, including ours at cutover.
Why does my site have no tier? Tiers begin at 60. Under the current model a tier marks earned external standing, so most sites do not launch with one. A missing tier is a stage, not a verdict.
Can I raise Standing quickly? No — and that is the point. Standing is built from what the rest of the web does: linking to you, searching for you, citing you. It is deliberately outside your ability to edit. Early work shows up first in Integrity, and in Momentum once your search volumes clear the floors.
Where can I see this on a real site? Our own snapshot is public and unedited, including the layers where we score poorly: /proofs/trustgrowth.