Top Rated status drives 28.5x more crawls from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity; every winner earns the award through verified customer reviews alone
SANTA BARBARA, Calif., June 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Today, TrustRadius, an HG Insights company and the most trusted B2B buyer intelligence platform, revealed the winners of its 2026 Top Rated Awards. This year’s class includes 375 product winners from 209 vendors across 519 different categories.
For buyers, the Top Rated badge is one of the most reliable signals of product quality available. There are no shortcuts to earning it; no vendor fees, no purchased placements. Winners are determined entirely by verified customer reviews, with each recognized product demonstrating strong customer satisfaction, reliable performance, and continued relevance within its category.
Products must meet three criteria to qualify:
Recency: 10 or more new or updated reviews in the last 12 months
Relevancy: Traffic volume of at least .5% within the category
Rating: A trScore of 7.5 or higher
For vendors, the badge is a sales and marketing asset that does the talking for them. Products that earn Top Rated status see, on average, a 90% increase in visibility on TrustRadius.
This year’s awards also arrive at a moment when the value of verified reviews extends well beyond the TrustRadius platform. TrustRadius’ product vision has always been to serve the buyer first, building the most trustworthy source of software intelligence available. That same commitment now pays dividends in AI-powered discovery. Over the last 30 days, crawl activity from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity shows that 2025 Top Rated winners received 28.5x more crawls than non-winners. TrustRadius expects increased crawls for 2026 winners as well. When you build for the buyer, you’re also building for the LLMs where buyers increasingly do their research.
The common thread seems to be recency. LLM crawlers scan for fresh, verified review content, and what they find shapes how a product gets described in AI-generated recommendations. The recency bar for Top Rated; 10 or more new or updated reviews in the past year; is exactly the kind of signal these models weigh when deciding what to surface. TrustRadius has optimized its product pages for LLM crawlers, ensuring that Top Rated winners’ review content is accurately represented across AI-driven channels. Additional tools to help vendors take control of their generative engine optimization (GEO) strategy are coming soon.
“Buyers are doing more research before they ever talk to a vendor, and they’re looking for proof, not promises,” said Susan Torrey, Senior Director, Brand and Communications at HG Insights. “Top Rated cuts through the noise because the verdict comes from actual users. That credibility matters even more now that AI tools are pulling from review content when buyers ask for recommendations. Every product on this list earned its place by delivering for customers, and that’s exactly the kind of signal LLMs are surfacing.”
