Trust Flow

Trust Flow (TF) is Majestic's metric for backlink quality, scored 0–100. Unlike volume-based metrics, TF measures how close a site sits to a curated set of trusted seed sites in the link graph. The shorter the path from a major trusted hub to your domain, and the more such paths exist, the higher your TF.

TF is most useful when paired with Citation Flow (CF), which measures the raw volume and influence of the link graph regardless of trust. The ratio of TF to CF — sometimes called the trust ratio — is a quick health check on a backlink profile. A ratio near 1.0 indicates a balanced, editorially earned profile. A ratio well below 0.5 often signals a profile dominated by low-quality or manipulative links, the kind of pattern Google's spam systems are designed to discount.

The seed-based approach makes TF resistant to certain types of manipulation. Spammy PBN (Private Blog Network) links rarely connect back to trusted hubs, so they contribute very little to TF even when they inflate CF or raw Backlink counts. This is why TF is a favourite metric for due diligence during domain acquisition — a domain with high citation flow but anaemic trust flow is usually carrying a history operators do not want to inherit.

Topical Trust Flow extends the concept by computing TF within specific topic clusters. A finance site can have high TF overall but low Topical TF in the cooking category, which would matter if it were trying to rank for recipe queries. This topical decomposition is useful for evaluating whether a referring domain is contextually relevant to your niche.

TF responds slowly. Single new links rarely move the score noticeably because their effect depends on whether they shorten the path from a trusted seed. Recovery from a damaged TF profile is also slow — disavowing or removing the lowest-quality links may have to be paired with new editorial placements before the metric meaningfully recovers.