You are right to ask how we know. Seven thousand six hundred sites, ten dimensions, fifty signals, one standard, and what it found. Score your site on the same fifty signals.
When someone tells you they studied seven thousand six hundred websites, you are right to ask how. So here is how.
We scored criminal defense websites, the market where the Trust Frame began, against one standard. Ten dimensions of trust: empathy language, pricing transparency, process transparency, response time, intake friction, outcome realism, social proof, privacy and security, attorney accessibility, and availability architecture.
Each dimension breaks into five signals, and each signal is scored zero, one or two. Fifty signals, one hundred points. The dimensions came first, from the neuroscience of how a person decides under threat. The sites were scored against them, not the other way around. Nothing was adjusted because a well-known firm scored badly.
Every site was read the way a frightened visitor reads it: from the first screen, on a phone, at the hour the crisis search happens. Not from the sitemap.
Here is what came back. The market average sits in the mid-forties out of one hundred. Thirty-six sites reached the top band, Trust-Optimized. Fewer than one in two hundred. Three signals predicted trust more than the other seven combined: empathy language, about thirty-nine percent; pricing transparency, about twenty-two; process transparency, about eighteen. And traffic showed no correlation with trust at all. High-traffic sites failed just as often. They failed in front of more people.
The full methodology is in the book. The short version is that we will score your site on the same fifty signals, for free, and show you your number beside the seven thousand six hundred.
