How to Measure Brand Awareness, Trust, and Reputation

TL; DR

• In an AI-shaped market, reputation is a ranking signal—if robots can verify you, humans convert faster.
• Measure the upper trust layer.: branded search, proof density, message delivery, linkbacks.
• Pair it with the bottom action layer: qualified sessions, form completions, demo-held rate, and pipeline influenced.
• Run PESO as a sequence, not silos: Recognize → Believe → Act (Owned → Earned → Shared → Paid).
• If you skip trust, you pay the trust tax.
• Use a five-number scorecard updated weekly: branded search, % pages with citations, messages delivered, linkbacks, and cost to convert.

How to Measure Brand Awareness, Trust, and Reputation

In a team meeting last week, a colleague said, “I’m in more conversations that are pushing the thought that PR, thought leadership, paid editorial, etc., need to be more “action oriented” vs. awareness and perception building specifically because they need KPIs that tie to business (not just brand). This feels like the downside of “collapsing the funnel.”

Yes! And…

Reputation and recognition are becoming more measurable (aka “action-oriented”) today because, without them, you don’t have a brand. You don’t show up in Google searches. You don’t show up in AI answers. Your sales team has a harder time with prospecting. And your CEO’s mom has nothing to tell her friends at bridge club.

That’s because, in an AI-shaped market, reputation is a ranking signal. And my colleague is right. It is the downside of collapsing the funnel because we forget that the brilliantly “action-oriented” plays will never see the light of day if buyers (and the machines) don’t already recognize you and trust you.

Reputation is not fluffy anymore. Machines read signals humans have always cared about—consistency, credibility, corroboration—and convert them into rank. 

Brand search volume becomes a proxy for recognition. Third-party citations and expert quotes become proof. High-quality coverage and content that others reference becomes authority. 

When those signals are thin, your most “action-oriented” CTA does not work.

The job isn’t to choose between reputation and response. It’s to engineer response from reputation. 

How Trust Becomes Rank (and Revenue)

In 2025, the internet doesn’t get to know you over coffee or ask to pick your brain. It’s far too productive for that. 

Instead, it quickly scans to see if you know what the heck you’re talking about. Every tool—Google, Perplexity, LinkedIn, TikTok, OpenAI—asks three things: 

1. Do I recognize you? 
2. Can I believe you? 
3. Who else says you’re legit? 

When the answers are obvious to the robots, your content travels farther with less spend. When they’re fuzzy, even the smartest action-oriented metric feels like pushing a boulder uphill.

Recognition is the dull, housekeeping part most teams skip until it bites them. It’s the consistent brand and author info, the About page that actually says something, product names that match everywhere, and bios that aren’t three different versions of the same person. 

It’s also whether people search for your company by name. No one really wants to invest in it because it is hard to measure. 

Is it boring? Yes. Is it essential? Also yes. 

Machines love consistency. So do humans who are deciding whether to click.

Here’s how it plays out in the real world. 

Two teams launch the same webinar with the same budget. 

Team A has a proof-packed pillar page that the webinar ties back to, a couple of strong earned placements quoting their POV, and employees repeating the same language on social. Branded search is ticking up.

Team B has a well-designed landing page with lots of pretty pictures and a handful of influencers sharing the info on social. 

Team A’s clicks are cheaper and their form completions are higher—not because their button is greener, but because the web can already vouch for them. 

Team B has a better-designed page, but pays the trust tax.

Track This Data

To make this make sense to the money people, you want to look at data from a few things:

• Growth in branded search
• The percentage of new pages with external citations and SME quotes
• Whether your key messages show up in coverage, and if so, how many do
• The quality of the outlets linking to you
• Qualified sessions
• Form completions
• Demo-held rate
• Pipeline influenced 

When growth in branded search increases, for instance, the pipeline influenced becomes easier and cheaper a few weeks later. 

When your key messages fall flat and don’t show up in coverage, you end up spending money to boost your webinar and wonder why no one is registering. 

Trust is a set of readable signals. Make them obvious, and everything “action-oriented” gets easier—clicks, forms, demos, revenue.

Build the Trust Layer with the PESO Model©

If trust is what carries your CTA, the PESO Model© is how you build the engine. 

Most teams try to do everything everywhere all at once. 

Don’t do that. 

Run it as a sequence: Recognize → Believe → Act. 

You’re teaching both people and machines who you are (recognize), why you’re credible (believe), and where to click next (act).

Start with Owned: Make Recognition Easy

Owned is your foundation; your home base. It’s where your entity lives and your facts and figures are organized.

• Create (or tighten) an authority hub for your key topic. Give it a real author with a real bio, link to their LinkedIn, and include quotes from internal SMEs. Add external citations and first-party data where available. Tie every “action” asset—webinar, guide, demo—to this hub so authority consolidates instead of scattering across microsites.
  
• If someone lands on this page cold, would a human and an LLM know who you are, what you stand for, and where your proof lives? If not, you’re not ready for amplification.

Then Earned: Borrow Credibility on Purpose

Once your foundation is credible, go get other people to say it.

• Pitch one sharp point of view, not six talking points. Offer an SME who’s available on short notice. Hand reporters a concise proof pack (three stats, two visuals, one quotable line) that aligns with your owned hub. Your goal isn’t “coverage anywhere”; it’s an anchor placement others will cite.
• Once published, review it to ensure the piece does not use your language or data verbatim and link back to your hub. If yes, you’ve added wattage to the system. If not, refine the POV or the proof and pitch another story to a different digital publisher.

Next Shared: Make the Message Travel

Repetition builds recognition; consistency builds the entity graph.

• Create short posts for employees, leaders, creators, and community. Keep phrasing close to the headlines used on your anchor page and in the earned media. This will make it easier for the machines to connect the dots. Use a short video to restate the exact claim that’s in print, linking back to the hub.
• Are people repeating your phrasing and tagging your SME? Are saves/shares outpacing likes? If the message isn’t echoing, simplify the line and try again.

Finally Paid: Amplify the Winners, Not the Wishes

Paid should pour gas on what’s already catching, not hide a weak flame.

• Promote only the top 10–20% of assets that are already earning clicks and time-on-page. Suppress the bottom half weekly. Use creative that mirrors the exact language that worked in earned/shared.
• If you have a lower cost per acquisition and a higher form completion rate without new creative or spending more money, you’ll know your trust layer is doing its job.

Make Your Reputation Quantifiable

If someone on the exec team is asking, “But how does brand move the business?” this is where you smile, pull up a simple scorecard, and show them exactly how. 

One of my favorite things to do in meetings like that is turn to the VP of sales or the chief revenue officer and say, “How much more challenging is your job if the prospect has never heard of you when you call?”

They always say it’s significantly more challenging.

Then I can explain that, without brand, without reputation, without thought leadership, no one freaking knows how you are. Without those things, you’re not showing up in AI answers.

And if no one knows who you are and you don’t show up in AI answers, you effectively don’t exist.

Sure, the sales team can keep calling on them, but they may never get through. And, if they do, the sales cycle is incredibly long.

Which would you rather have? 

That almost always gets them.

Once you have them, you can show them proof. 

Track the Upper Trust Layer

The first thing you want to do is track the upper trust layer. We used to call this the top of the funnel. But, since the funnel has collapsed, we’re now calling it the upper trust layer.

These aren’t vanity metrics; they’re the things that tell you if people (and machines) recognize you, believe you, and can corroborate you.

To figure out if people recognize you, there are two things to track: branded search index and entity consistency.

• For branded search index, track monthly searches for your name (company, products, services, and/or execs). You can use Google Search Console and Google Trends. You want to see a steady climb after big owned and earned media pushes.
• For entity consistency, you want to have 100% of your top website pages to have a clean author card, matching bios, and a real About page. 

To track whether your organization has credibility, you’re going to track proof density and original data mentions.

• For proof density, track the percentage of new or updated pages with at least one external citation and one SME quote. You want to be between 60 and 80%.
• For original data mentions, count the number of assets that include first-party stats you can stand behind (even small ones).

And lastly, you want to track for corroboration. For this, you’ll track message delivery rate, earned quality score, and linkback rate.

• For message delivery rate, track the number of earned coverage that includes your exact key message or messages. You should aim for at least 50%, but obviously, more is better.
• For the earned quality score, you can create a weighted number for the coverage. It gets a one if it’s in a blog or newsletter, two in a podcast or trade, and three in a top-tier pub. That’s not an exact formula. You can create your own. The point is to score it, stay consistent, and that the total trends up over time.
• And for the linkback rate, you’re looking for the number of placements that link to your website. Ideally, they’ll link to your pillar content or a specific page, but you can count links to your home page, too. Your goal here is to have at least 20% linking back.

Pair with the Bottom Action Layer

Now that you have metrics for the upper trust layer, you can focus on the bottom action layer. These will help you prove that the work you’re doing around trust and reputation is paying off.

You’ll want to track:

• Qualified sessions to your website—your anchor pages and content hubs 
• Form completions
• Demo-held rate, not just booked
• Pipeline influenced

The last two mean you’ll need to work closely with sales, so go make them your besties, if they’re not already. 

Make It One Scorecard

From there, you’ll create a scorecard that you’ll update weekly. This will be what you share at a moment’s notice, and what will also help you tell the measurement story around brand, trust, reputation, and thought leadership.

The scorecard should include five numbers:

1. Branded search
2. The percentage of pages with AI and traditional search citations 
3. Number of messages delivered in your coverage
4. Number of linkbacks to your website
5. Cost to convert

You want numbers one through four to move first. The cost to convert, then, should drop within eight weeks. If it doesn’t drop, you’re paying a trust tax somewhere. The challenge will be in figuring it out. Go back to those metrics and see where you have a gap.

When you quantify reputation this way, you stop debating “brand vs. performance” and start showing a relay: trust hands the baton to action, and action runs faster.

Brand Awareness Does Contribute to Growth

At the end of the day, not everything can be action-oriented, but everything can contribute to and influence the organization’s goals. 

When your trust and reputation are high, everything else gets easier: clicks get cheaper, forms don’t feel risky, demos actually happen, and revenue shows up sooner. 

When you don’t, you pay the trust tax—higher costs, longer cycles, and a lot of “why isn’t this working?” meetings.

I know the money people want you to show them the money where brand is concerned, but I’ve hopefully given you enough content to be able to build the case for showing how and why it matters without a direct correlation to money.

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