The arrangement will let merchants showcase and manage Trustpilot reviews on their online stores, Bloomberg News reported Saturday (June 27), citing an interview with Adrian Blair, Trustpilot’s chief executive.
Blair said that third-party consumer feedback is growing in importance as artificial intelligence plays a larger role in online retail.
“The key problem that all these Shopify merchants are facing is, how do you actually build trust with customers now in the age of AI?” he said. “There is so much that is now being created by AI, this kind of synthetic content, and Trustpilot is a canonical source of what people say about their experiences with businesses.”
AI-driven search engines and AI shopping assistants also depend on data such as Trustpilot’s, the report added, meaning that a greater volume of reviews can create more visibility online. Trustpilot content is already a vital resource for large language models, with the click-through rate from AI search climbing 1,490% in its most recent financial year, Bloomberg said.
Integrated Trustpilot reviews on the Shopify platform are set to go live Monday (June 29), the report continued. Blair had said in March that his company was exploring partnerships with the internet’s shopping giants.
The Shopify collaboration is “the first kind of major proof point, so we are executing against the strategy that we set out earlier this year,” Blair told Bloomberg, adding that the agreement isn’t exclusive and Trustpilot hopes to pursue partnerships across a variety of industries.
“We see huge adoption of Trustpilot with banks, insurance companies, utilities, accounting firms, cybersecurity companies, law firms, et cetera,” Blair added. “For us retail is very important, but it is one of many verticals.”
Meanwhile, recent research from PYMNTS Intelligence shows that consumers want AI to be involved in their online shopping journey, though more as a navigator than a driver.
“Tasks involving discovery, comparison shopping and information gathering emerged as natural fits for AI,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this month. “Areas involving payments, financial commitments and irreversible decisions, however, continued to trigger greater demand for human oversight.”
The findings, from the May 2026 Consumer AI Benchmark, indicate that the next phase of AI adoption will hinge less on the sophistication of the technology and depend more on whether merchants can find the balance between automation and human control.
