Trust Flow is a link metric from the backlink tool Majestic. It scores a URL or domain from 0 to 100 based on how closely it is linked to a hand-picked set of trusted seed sites: the more directly trusted sites link to you, the higher the score. Majestic pairs it with Citation Flow, a volume-based metric, and offers Topical Trust Flow to show which subject areas the trust comes from. Google does not use it.
How it is calculated
Majestic starts from seed sites it judges trustworthy and measures how link influence flows outward from them. Sites a few links away from trusted seeds score higher than sites only reachable through long chains of low-quality links. Majestic does not publish the full method or seed list.
Topical Trust Flow breaks the score into categories, which helps judge whether a site's authority comes from topics related to yours.
Reading it alongside Citation Flow
Trust Flow is usually read as a ratio with Citation Flow. A site with high Citation Flow but low Trust Flow has many links but few from trusted sources, which can indicate link spam. A balanced pair suggests links that are both numerous and reputable. These are heuristics, not rules.
Limits
It is a vendor model built on Majestic's own crawl. Scores differ from other tools, change when Majestic updates its index, and can be gamed. Use it to screen and compare inside Majestic, then review sites by hand.
Example
Screening a prospect list
An illustrative IT service management vendor, Ticketmoor, exports a list of potential guest post targets. In Majestic, a few show high Citation Flow and very low Trust Flow, with Topical Trust Flow in unrelated categories. Reviewing them by hand confirms they are link-selling blogs, and they are dropped.
Common mistakes
Treating it as a Google metric
Trust Flow is Majestic's estimate. Google has its own signals and does not use vendor scores.
Comparing it with other vendors' scores
Trust Flow, Domain Authority and Domain Rating use different data and models and are not interchangeable.
Questions
It depends on your niche. Compare against competitors and the sites ranking for your target searches in the same tool.
