6 Ways to Scale Trust with the PESO Model

TL;DR

AI isn’t guessing who to trust, it’s scanning for proof. AI search engines reward consistent, credible, and reinforced content, not just volume or visibility.
One-off wins don’t cut it anymore. If your content isn’t part of a repeatable, multi-channel strategy, you’re not building trust—you’re creating noise.
The PESO Model© isn’t just a media model; it’s your trust infrastructure. Think of it as your operating system for credibility, discoverability, and reputation at scale.
Trust has to be designed as part of your system, not treated as a bonus outcome. It’s the product of intentional strategy, execution, and measurement across Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned channels.
The brands that win aren’t the loudest; they’re the most consistently trusted, and PESO helps you get there.

6 Ways to Scale Trust with the PESO Model©

Ask any communicator or marketer who’s been around a minute, and they’ll tell you trust used to be built on handshakes, relationships, and maybe a few solid media hits. You pitched the right story, landed a feature, and boom, your brand got the credibility boost it needed.

But those days were the good old days, and today is much different. Truth be told, I think today is an exciting time to be a communicator.

The people we’re trying to reach don’t wait for a news release or a headline; they turn to search bars, generative AI tools, and algorithm-curated feeds. And those systems aren’t measuring trust by intuition or sentiment, they’re scanning for signals, patterns, and proof.

In part one of this series, we talked about how trust is no longer just a communications goal; it’s the gateway to visibility in an AI-driven world. We also explored five common myths that hold brands back from earning that trust. From chasing vanity metrics to believing that good content markets itself, these outdated assumptions keep teams stuck in old models while the landscape has moved on.

Because here’s the reality—generative engines don’t just rank what’s loud, they reward what’s consistent, credible, and reinforced across multiple channels. They’re looking for patterns of trustworthiness that are repeatable and recognizable at scale.

That means, if you want your brand to be seen and trusted, you can’t rely on one-off wins or siloed content. You need an operating system that turns trust into a strategic output and that ensures you’re not just visible, but credible everywhere it matters.

Trust Is Hard to Build And Harder to Scale

The big question—how do we do all of this?

We know that trust is now the key to visibility, that AI is modeling trust based on a complex mix of signals, and that showing up in the right place at the right time isn’t a marketing or communications wish list item; it’s the only way to stay discoverable.

Here’s something you also probably already know: establishing real trust takes work and time.

Creating trust-driven content takes resources, getting mentioned in the media takes relationships, building a loyal community takes consistency, and none of those things happen from a one-off effort with a microsite and some retargeting dollars.

That means if you want to build trust at the scale generative search now demands, you can’t just dabble in content, You need:

Volume and consistency: to show up often enough to be recognized
Multi-channel reinforcement: to be seen in multiple trusted places
Validation: through backlinks, engagement, media coverage, and audience action

Trust has to be repeatable, measurable, and integrated. It’s not something you can do “on the side.” It’s something that has to be instilled into how your team operates every day.

This is where most teams hit a wall. Not because they don’t care about trust, but because they don’t have a framework for building trust at scale.

Your Operating System for Scalable Trust

If trust is the new currency of visibility, then you need a marketing operating system built to manage it. That’s where the PESO Model© comes in. It’s not just as a content framework, it’s the infrastructure that powers how modern marketing and communications teams build, reinforce, and scale trust across channels.

Think of it like your internal operating system that connects every tactic, every channel, and every message so your entire marketing and communications function works in sync. It moves you from siloed efforts to integrated execution, turning trust from a hopeful outcome into a consistent, repeatable output.

When the PESO Model is at the center of how your team operates, you stop chasing credibility and start engineering it. You build a system where content, amplification, validation, and optimization aren’t separate tasks, they’re interdependent functions that drive sustained reputation growth.

And that’s exactly what AI search engines prioritize: consistent signals of authority, reinforced across platforms over time. PESO gives you the system to deliver those signals repeatedly, reliably, and at scale so your brand earns not just attention, but algorithmic trust.

Use the PESO Model to Scale Trust

Many of you may be wondering: how do I put the PESO Model to work to scale reputation for my brand?

Used intentionally, PESO becomes more than a media framework; it’s your system for scaling trust across every stage of the customer journey, and every channel they engage with along the way.

Here are six ways to get started. Think of these less as a checklist and more like six levers, with each one helping you scale trust faster, stronger, and in a way that’s built to last:

1. Start with shared messaging, not siloed deliverables

Too often, teams work in functional silos where PR writes the release, content teams create the blog, paid builds the ads, and so on. But when your audience sees disjointed messages across touchpoints, it doesn’t reinforce trust; it erodes it.

Shared messaging isn’t just a campaign tactic; it’s your strategic guardrail. Shared messaging doesn’t mean copy/paste across channels. It means all efforts ladder up to a common value proposition that reflects your brand’s credibility and intent.

Every audience touchpoint should reinforce the same value proposition, whether it’s an analyst quote, a video series, a LinkedIn post, or a paid campaign. When everyone is working from the same narrative framework, every touchpoint builds on the last.

When the PESO Model is aligned, your story becomes louder, clearer, and more credible everywhere it shows up. Without that alignment, teams end up creating content in silos that compete instead of reinforcing. And in a generative search world, mixed signals = mixed results.

2. Map your PESO Model strategy to the full audience journey

Your customer journey is unlike any other, and that means trust doesn’t form all at once. Different channels support different stages of the journey, but most teams don’t stop to align their PESO Model efforts with where the audience actually is.

You have to understand how to leverage your channels in a way that aligns with that customer journey. For example, owned media might educate early-stage buyers, while earned media adds third-party validation further down the funnel. Shared content helps connect emotionally, while paid can guide or accelerate decisions. When you map PESO intentionally, you stop forcing content into the wrong place, and you start building trust where it’s most likely to grow.

3. Use momentum from one channel to amplify the others

If something is working, don’t just report on it…repurpose it! That’s the power of a PESO mindset. A single piece of high-performing content should echo across multiple channels.

I brought up this idea in a recent client meeting and got some interesting feedback. Someone on the call had concerns about duplicating content across channels and not wanting customers to see the same content over and over. Ok, fair point. But this isn’t about being redundant or duplicating content; it’s about reinforcing credibility.

We’re not putting the same content in multiple places; we’re repurposing content and tailoring it to that channel so it connects with our audiences the right way on the right channel to move them along the customer journey.

A media hit? Turn it into a blog post, a social series, and a targeted ad. A webinar with great engagement can be sliced up for earned media pitching, paid retargeting, and shared clips. The more your messages echo across channels, the more trust you build in the eyes of people and machines. The key is to design your strategy around momentum, not just content creation. It’s the echo that builds reputation, not the original moment alone.

And when people see your ideas echoed in different places, it builds the sense that you’re not just saying something, you’re standing for something and building trust.

4. Automate where it makes sense, and humanize where it counts

First things first: don’t be scared of AI. But let’s be clear, AI and automation are tools, not strategies. Use them to monitor brand mentions, manage campaign workflows, optimize distribution, and even spark content ideas. They help scale your system, not define your voice.

But trust isn’t just a technical signal built by bots. It’s reinforced through voice, tone, consistency, and authenticity, which are things machines haven’t figured out how to replicate (yet). If you want to build real credibility, you need real people.

Make space for the human elements that signal both credibility to machines and connection to audiences. This could look like executive POVs, founder videos, subject-matter-driven thought leadership, or community interaction in comments and replies.

This is where you can let AI do the heavy lifting behind the scenes, but you need to keep humans front and center where trust is being built. That’s how you balance scalability with authenticity.

5. Make reputation measurable

You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and yet too many trust-building efforts are still judged on gut feel. You still have to set benchmarks, track trends, and show the value of building trust over time.

The PESO Model offers tangible signals you can track to show progress over time: backlink growth, social engagement, earned media quality, content-driven conversions, and domain authority. The goal isn’t just to generate reports; it’s to identify patterns, measure consistency, and quantify how trust is compounding over time.

These aren’t just marketing KPIs; they’re indicators of strategic credibility that can influence sales pipelines, partner confidence, and even investor sentiment. These metrics prove that trust is not only present, but growing, and that’s the data leadership teams care about.

When you treat trust as a measurable business asset, it stops being “nice to have” and starts being a real lever for growth.

6. Treat the PESO Model like your operating system

This isn’t a campaign layer; it’s your reputation engine and framework. When PESO is baked into how your team operates, from content planning to amplification to measurement, every activity has a multiplier effect. Every tactic becomes more effective, and every channel works harder to reinforce the trust you’re building.

The PESO Model forces integration and visibility across functions, which means less rework, more alignment, and stronger trust signals across the board. It’s not the job of one person or one department; it’s the operating system for your entire reputation strategy.

This is the real opportunity…when trust becomes your default output, visibility becomes the reward.

Scaling Trust Is the New Competitive Edge

Reputation is no longer what people say when you’re not in the room; it’s what algorithms say when you’re not in the search results, and it’s determined by what information machines provide your audiences.

It’s counterintuitive, but visibility is earned through trust, not the other way around. And from that, trust is built through systems. The brands that rise won’t be the ones shouting the loudest; they’ll be the ones showing up consistently, credibly, and intentionally across every channel that matters.

The PESO Model gives you the infrastructure to do just that.

So the challenge now is simple: stop treating trust like an outcome and start treating it like an input. Start building systems and operate like reputation is your product, because whether you want to admit it or not, it is!

6 Ways to Scale Trust with the PESO Model

TL;DR