Definition:
A Trust Graph™ is a structured network of entities, attributes, and relationships that collectively signal credibility, accuracy, and provenance to AI/ML systems and search engines.
Explanation:
In a Trust Graph, each node represents a meaningful unit — such as a person, organization, dataset, page, or fact — and each edge defines a verifiable relationship, such as citation, authorship, co-occurrence, or content inheritance. This graph-based structure enhances the semantic understanding of digital content by connecting:
- Entities (people, plans, pages, datasets)
- Facts (costs, stats, benefits)
- Sources (CMS.gov, Medicare.gov, trusted publishers)
- Authorship (identity, roles, credentials)
Trust Graphs can be built using structured data (e.g., JSON-LD), semantic relationships (e.g., sameAs, wasDerivedFrom), and publishing infrastructure that emits consistent truth signals across platforms.
Example Use:
“Each of our Medicare plan pages adds a new node to the Trust Graph, complete with citations, defined terms, and dataset provenance.”
Why It Matters:
Search engines and AI models rely on structured relationships to evaluate content quality. By building a Trust Graph, publishers help systems understand not just what is being said, but who said it, where it came from, and how it connects to broader knowledge.
More Trust Publishing Definitions:
- AI Visibility
- Artificial Intelligence Trust Optimization (AITO™)
- Canonical Answer
- Citation Graphs
- Citation Scaffolding
- Co-occurrence
- Co-Occurrence Conditioning
- Co-Occurrence Confidence
- data-* Attributes
- DefinedTerm Set
- EEAT Rank
- Entity Alignment
- Entity Relationship Mapper
- Format Diversity Score
- Format Diversity Score™
- Ingestion Pipelines
- JSON-LD
- Machine-Ingestible
- Markdown
- Memory Conditioning
- Microdata
- Passive Trust Signals
- PROV
- Retrievability
- Retrieval Bias Modifier
- Retrieval Chains
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Schema
- Scoped Definitions
- Semantic Digest™
- Semantic Persistence
- Semantic Proximity
- Semantic Trust Conditioning™
- Signal Weighting
- Signal Weighting Engine™
- Structured Signals
- Temporal Consistency
- Topic Alignment
- Training Graph
- Trust Alignment Layer™
- Trust Architecture
- Trust Footprint
- Trust Graph™
- Trust Marker™
- Trust Publishing Markup Layer
- Trust Signal™
- Trust-Based Publishing
- TrustCast™
- TrustRank™
- Truth Marker™
- Truth Signal Stack
- Turtle (TTL)
- Verifiability
- XML