For years, SEO has been one of the biggest priorities in digital marketing. Businesses invested heavily in optimizing websites, targeting keywords and trying to rank on the first page of Google. The higher a company appeared in search results, the more visibility and traffic it could potentially earn. But online search behavior is starting to look very different than it did even a few years ago.

For many years, trust was seen as a brand value, something industries cultivated through design, reputation management, and messaging. Today, trust has entered the algorithm, and it has become a structural requirement.