Trustpilot Gets a One-Star Review From Investors

THE GIST

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Trustpilot’s underlying business is still growing quickly, with revenue up 23%, bookings up 22% and adjusted EBITDA climbing 46% in the first half. But investors instead focused on a surprise statutory loss, several one-off charges and management’s decision to leave full-year guidance unchanged after a huge run in the shares.

WHAT HAPPENED

Trustpilot shares fell as much as 20% after the online review platform reported strong first-half growth but delivered a messier bottom line than investors had expected.

Revenue increased 23% to $151.4 million in the six months to June, equivalent to 19% growth at constant currencies, while bookings rose 22% to $171.2 million.

Adjusted EBITDA climbed 46% to a record $26.3 million and the margin expanded to 17.4%, although the profit figure came in slightly below the $27 million company-compiled consensus.

The statutory result looked considerably worse, with Trustpilot swinging to a net loss of roughly $1.1 million after reporting a profit a year earlier.

That reversal was driven by around $6 million of non-recurring items, including a €4 million fine from Italy’s competition authority and a provision of roughly $1 million for historical sales taxes that had not been collected in certain US states.

The Italian penalty relates to findings by the country’s competition regulator, which Trustpilot is appealing, while management said the U.S. tax issue does not affect the underlying operational performance of the business.

Despite the strong revenue growth, Trustpilot kept its 2026 outlook unchanged. It continues to expect high-teens constant-currency revenue growth and an improvement of two to three percentage points in its adjusted EBITDA margin.

That lack of an upgrade mattered because the shares had risen roughly 60% through the previous session, helped by enthusiasm around US growth, larger enterprise contracts and Trustpilot’s potential role in AI-generated search and recommendations.

WHY IT MATTERS

Trustpilot has spent the past few years moving from a fast-growing but loss-making internet platform toward a business with genuine operating leverage, and the underlying first-half numbers suggest that transition is still progressing.

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Revenue rose substantially faster than the company’s cost base, adjusted EBITDA increased by nearly half and North American bookings had already shown particularly strong momentum earlier in the year. The subscription model also gives Trustpilot good visibility because signed contracts generally feed into revenue over their duration.

AI is adding another potentially valuable layer to that story. Consumers increasingly use chatbots and AI search tools when deciding which products and businesses to trust, and those systems need large pools of independent review data to support their answers.

Trustpilot argues that its scale makes its content particularly visible in AI-generated results, potentially increasing the value of its platform to businesses that want to appear credible wherever consumers are searching.

The difficulty is that investors had already priced in a great deal of that optimism, which means strong results increasingly need to come with upgraded expectations rather than simply confirmation that everything remains on track.

That explains why relatively small accounting and regulatory issues caused such a large market reaction. The Italian fine and U.S. sales-tax provision do not fundamentally change the economics of the review platform, but they introduce noise into a story investors had come to expect would be unusually clean.

The statutory loss also highlights an important distinction between adjusted earnings and what ultimately reaches shareholders. A company can produce excellent operating growth while regulatory penalties, taxes and other exceptional items still consume the profit beneath it.

For a business built around the word trust, investors are likely to be particularly sensitive to anything that suggests internal financial controls or regulatory compliance need tightening.

WHAT’S NEXT

The key question is whether management’s unchanged guidance proves conservative, because another period of strong bookings and US growth could still leave room for an upgrade later in the year.

Investors will also want reassurance that the sales-tax issue has been fully contained and that Trustpilot’s appeal against the Italian regulatory fine does not produce additional financial surprises.

The longer-term AI opportunity remains attractive, but after the stock’s strong run the market has clearly raised the standard required to impress it. Trustpilot can keep growing quickly, but investors now want that growth to arrive with fewer footnotes.