Trustpilot CEO Adrian Blair: "Perfection doesn't build trust"

What does it take to lead a company whose entire product is trust? Trustpilot CEO Adrian Blair found out the hard way in December 2025, when a US short-seller accused the review platform of running an extortion racket and wiped almost a third off its share price in a single day.

Speaking to Sir Richard Harpin on the Business Leader podcast, Blair reveals how his team fought back and why trust is the foundation of every business – whether its leaders realise it or not.

Blair's CV is a lesson in scaling. He helped take Just Eat from Series A to the FTSE 100 and led Dext to a private equity exit before succeeding Trustpilot's founder in 2023. Here, he shares why transparency beats perfection, how AI search has turned customer reviews into a must-have, and the hiring rule he refuses to break. In our interview, you will learn about:

• Why owning your mistakes builds more trust than never making any
• How to handle a crisis of reputation
• Why AI has made customer reviews essential, not optional
• The one hiring rule that Adrian Blair won't break

On his last day at bookkeeping automation platform Dext, Blair wrote an email saying he'd like his epitaph as CEO to be the company's 4.7 rating on Trustpilot. He couldn't have known that, just 18 months later, he would be in the top job at that very platform.

Blair joined Trustpilot in 2023, two years after it had listed on the London Stock Exchange. He succeeded the company's founder, Peter Mühlmann, as CEO.

"You've got to respect and almost revere the founder, because they're the one who had the guts, the energy and the vision to actually get this thing going," he says. "But often, as a non-founder CEO, you're brought in to bring more discipline into the business. You've got to have the courage of your convictions to do things differently from how the founder would have done them."

Trustpilot is a product built on trust, which Blair argues is the foundation of every business, whether its leaders realise it or not. "Only Richard can know who Richard trusts and nobody can buy or sell that," he tells Harpin. "That's a very personal thing to you. Without trust, nobody wants to work for you, nobody wants to be your customer and nobody wants to invest in you.

"It's not perfection that builds trust, it's transparency. When people see a company acknowledging its mistakes and getting into a transparent dialogue with someone in public about what happened, that in itself helps to build trust."

How Adrian Blair took Trustpilot out of the red

While Trustpilot was already the world's largest open customer feedback platform, it posted a loss in the year before Blair took the helm. It's projected to hit 25 per cent EBITDA for 2027 and up to 30 per cent by 2030.

"What makes that possible is that we're inherently a high-margin digital business," says Blair. "We have gross margins of 83 per cent. The balance we have to achieve is that we're also going after an incredibly exciting large opportunity, so we have to get the pace of that progression right."

One of the opportunities the company is not shying away from is AI search. Promptwatch, which tracks domain citations across ChatGPT responses, found that Trustpilot is the fifth most cited domain globally.

"AI needs to get its opinions from somewhere," explains Blair. "It reads Trustpilot reviews and looks at what millions of other people have said. We see our job as being to make it heard, to amplify the voices that are being expressed on Trustpilot through whatever channels we can find. So we love Large Language Models for that reason."

Trustpilot customers are baking the platform into their Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) strategy, which has surpassed SEO as companies scramble to stay ahead in a world shaped by AI. "Genuine human feedback on customer experience is just best practice," he says. "It's seen as the standard way that companies optimise that. It's gone from being useful to being something that is absolutely essential."

When Trustpilot's trust was tested

In December 2025, American short-seller Grizzly Research published a report comparing Trustpilot to a "mafia-style extortion racket". It claimed that Trustpilot boosted the ratings of companies that signed up for its premium memberships while trying to "attract hyper-negative reviews" for businesses that refused to pay. Trustpilot's stock dropped 32 per cent, its biggest one-day fall.

"It was a tough period," Blair reflects. "I hadn't been in a situation like this before, where suddenly there are a lot of lies about your company put out there that you very quickly have to rebut, getting the truth in front of people before all the lies take hold."

His team released a detailed response within a day, which Blair credits for the quick recovery in the share price. The biggest lesson was about preparation rather than response. Six months later, Trustpilot held a Capital Markets Day dedicated to the theme of trust, bringing investors, analysts and journalists together with the internal teams who work on platform integrity.

"There's no reason why we couldn't have done that sort of thing a year or two prior," he reflects. "I'd say to other CEOs: think about risks to your business. Think, 'If this thing happened that's a risk, what would we wish today that we'd done about it?' And then do that thing."

The hiring rule that Adrian Blair won’t break

Blair has led hiring at three different companies and he's candid about what he's got wrong. "If I ever feel I've got a hiring decision wrong, I'm analytical about it." What he noticed while hiring at pace internationally at Just Eat was a correlation between hiring mistakes and people who he hadn't met in person. He now won't go ahead with a new hire unless he's met them face to face.

At senior level, he looks for a specific combination of traits. "You've got to find intelligent people but also people who are relentlessly honest about the truth," Blair says.

"Sometimes smart people use their intelligence in how they position things, instead of just calling a spade a spade. You really want people who can do both."

His other tip is to hire for resilience. "You're going to have a lot of tough days," he explains. "You're hiring people who want to be there for five years plus, not who'll shrivel and want to leave after six months."

Adrian Blair’s four lessons for leaders

Own your mistakes in public. Customers, staff and investors don’t expect perfection. They expect honesty, and how openly you handle a problem can earn you more trust than never having one.

Prepare for the crisis before it arrives. Ask yourself what you’d wish you had done if a known risk came to pass, then do it now. It costs far less than scrambling after the event.

Make your customers’ voices work harder. As AI increasingly shapes how buyers research businesses, genuine customer feedback now affects whether you get found at all. Treat reviews as a growth asset, not an afterthought.

Hire for honesty and resilience, and meet them first. Smart people are easy to find. The ones who will tell you the truth and stay the course through the tough days are rarer, which is why Blair won’t hire anyone he hasn’t met face to face.

Watch the full conversation between Adrian Blair and Sir Richard Harpin on YouTube.