TikTok, Wikipedia and the awkward return of trust
I’m not gonna lie. I’ve never been a fan of TikTok. Too distracting, too fast for me for an actual deep dive. (And yes, I am one of those odd creatures watching social videos without sound. Partially because I enjoy peace and quiet. Partially because this old fart does not manage to properly charge her headphones anyway.)
Lately though, TikTok has been doing something interesting, and judging by the number of client requests landing in our inbox, I suppose I should thank them.
Account verification. More specifically, verification through a significant amount of earned media clippings.
What is this about? The blue verification checkmark is there to help users understand who they’re dealing with. Who’s real, who’s notable, who’s worth trusting. What I find amusing is that one of the largest attention platforms on the planet increasingly relies on something decidedly old-school to make that judgement: media coverage.
For communications people this is one of those moments where you have to resist the urge to become unbearably smug. For years brands moved budgets away from PR and communications towards channels promising immediate attribution, immediate growth and immediate results. Which, to be fair, often worked for growth. Until suddenly trust became a problem again.
The brands that invested consistently in parallel in communications now have a useful asset sitting around: a track record. Articles. Interviews. Features. Third-party validation. While everyone else is scrambling to prove legitimacy fast, they can simply pull out their media clipping cards earned over years.
And that does not only matter for TikTok. The much bigger story is happening around AI and GEO. For example: One of the recurring conversations we’re having with clients at the moment revolves around Wikipedia. A website I’ve loved since the early internet, alongside niche forums and Reddit threads where strangers spent seventeen years collectively solving one oddly specific problem.
Wikipedia has always mattered, but GEO is giving it a whole new level of relevance.
The reason is fairly simple. AI systems don’t determine authority the way humans do. They look for patterns, references and sources that repeatedly appear across the web. They look for consensus. They look for signals of credibility. And whether people like it or not, Wikipedia remains one of the strongest credibility signals online because it is built around citations, editorial oversight and notability requirements.
A Wikipedia page for your brand or company is not something you can just get if you play fair and follow the Wikipedia rules. You can’t simply decide you deserve one and publish one. You need users to deem you are notable enough to justify being archived in what has become the largest source of knowledge in human history.
How do you get that notability? You need independent sources. You need coverage. You need proof that people outside your own company have written about you. In other words, you need the exact things communications teams have been trying to convince companies to invest in for years.
That’s also why so many organisations are suddenly coming back to PR with GEO questions. Not because communications has become fashionable again, but because authority has become valuable again. AI visibility increasingly depends on whether credible sources acknowledge your existence and expertise. Media coverage helps. Expert commentary helps. Industry references help. Wikipedia often becomes possible because of those things, not the other way around.
For all the technological leaps of the past decade, we seem to be arriving at a surprisingly familiar conclusion: trust still matters. Platforms need it. AI systems need it. Users need it.
And increasingly, proving trust looks suspiciously similar to what it looked like before social media convinced us that attention alone was enough.
