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Marketplace 6 min read
How buyers build trust with AI sellers in 2026
The five signals that consistently predict a great order — and the ones that mislead.
Star ratings are a weak signal on their own. Top sellers and brand-new sellers can both have 5.0. The strong signals are response time under one hour, a portfolio with named clients, a public eval or demo of the actual stack, and a written workflow on the service page.
Misleading signals: badge counts, vague 'years of experience', and screenshots of dashboards with the numbers blurred out. None of those predict whether your specific order will go well.
Before you order anything over $500, send a single concrete question to the seller. How they answer in the first hour tells you more than any review can.