Old Rules, New World: How B.J. Fogg’s Credibility Research Powers Trust in the Age of AI
How LutzKarré Builds on B.J. Fogg’s Research on Web Credibility
Long before AI began shaping the way people discover and evaluate businesses online, Stanford researcher B.J. Fogg identified something fundamental about human behavior: people make judgments of credibility based on clear, observable signals. His work on web credibility laid out the patterns that influence whether someone believes a site is reliable, authoritative, and worth engaging with.
At LutzKarré, we’ve taken those principles and adapted them for a new era — one where credibility isn’t just evaluated by humans, but also by AI systems deciding which brands to surface, summarize, and recommend.
Fogg’s research shows that credibility comes from four key ingredients: trustworthiness, expertise, design quality, and intentional consistency. These signals still matter today, but the way they appear — and the way they’re interpreted — has changed dramatically. Modern audiences expect clarity, coherence, and authenticity across every digital touchpoint, not just a website. And AI models now amplify (or penalize) those same signals when ranking and describing businesses.
That’s why LutzKarré uses Fogg’s framework as a scientific backbone for several of our products, especially the Trust Audit™, Web Credibility Score, and AI Visibility Audit™. We use his core principles as a foundation, then extend them with modern trust signals:
linguistic consistency across channels
message clarity and tone alignment
transparency and governance cues
signs of confidence in user behavior
how AI systems summarize and evaluate your presence
The result is a credibility model built for 2025 and beyond — one that blends the durability of behavioral science with the realities of AI-mediated discovery.
Fogg’s insight was simple: people believe what feels coherent, competent, and consistent. At LutzKarré, we’ve taken that insight further. We measure how consistently you present your brand, how trustworthy you appear, and how those signals translate into visibility and conversion.
Because credibility hasn’t changed — but the world interpreting it has.
