Trust Swap
Trust Swap is a technique for transferring authority signals from trusted external entities to your domain through structured data relationships. It is the entity-level equivalent of link building.
Three Mechanisms
- sameAs references — Connecting your entity to authoritative external profiles (LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Wikipedia) via schema markup
- Data citation context — Citing trusted external data alongside your proprietary data, creating an association of credibility
- Co-occurrence engineering — Ensuring your brand appears alongside trusted entities in content, schema, and AI training data
Entity Relationships vs Link Building
Traditional link building transfers authority through hyperlinks. Trust Swap transfers authority through entity relationships in structured data. While link building tells crawlers "this page vouches for that page," Trust Swap tells knowledge graph systems "this entity is associated with that entity."
As AI engines rely more on entity understanding than link graphs, Trust Swap becomes increasingly effective for building domain authority.
Related Terms
- Structural Pressure — The pillar that enables Trust Swap through schema
- Pressure SEO — The parent methodology
- Data-Baiting — Publishing proprietary data for citation