Trust Flow and Citation Flow are two scores, each from 0 to 100, published by Majestic, a UK-based backlink index. Citation Flow estimates how much link influence a URL or site has from the sheer weight of links pointing at it. Trust Flow estimates how closely those links connect back to a set of sites Majestic has reviewed by hand and judged trustworthy.
How Trust Flow and Citation Flow work
Majestic crawls the web and records which pages link to which. Citation Flow is calculated from that link graph in a way loosely similar to Google’s original PageRank: more links, from pages that themselves have many links, push the score up. It says nothing about whether those links are any good.
Trust Flow starts from a seed set of trusted sites, such as established universities, public bodies and major publishers. The closer a site sits to those seeds in the chain of links, the higher its Trust Flow. A link from a respected trade body counts for much more than a link from a page five steps removed from anything reputable.
Majestic also offers Topical Trust Flow, which breaks Trust Flow down by subject category, such as Business, Health or Recreation. That shows whether a site’s trusted links come from its own field.
Why they matter
Neither score is used by Google. They are third-party estimates, like Domain Authority from Moz or Domain Rating from Ahrefs. Their value is as a quick filter when you are judging links or prospects.
The relationship between the two is the useful part. A site with Citation Flow far higher than its Trust Flow has a lot of links but few from trusted sources, which is the classic shape of a site built on directories, comment spam or a link network. A site whose two scores are roughly in balance usually has a more natural link profile. Many practitioners treat a Trust Flow to Citation Flow ratio below about 0.5 as a reason to look more closely, though that is a rule of thumb, not a standard.
For UK link building, Topical Trust Flow helps when vetting a site that offers a guest post or sponsorship: a Surrey wedding blog whose trusted links all sit in Adult or Games/Gambling categories is not the relevant local site it appears to be.
Common mistakes
- Treating them as Google metrics. They are a model of the link graph, not Google’s view of it.
- Buying links on the strength of a score. Sellers know buyers screen on these numbers and some inflate them.
- Comparing across tools. A Trust Flow of 30 and a Domain Rating of 30 are not equivalent.
- Ignoring relevance and traffic. A modest score on a genuinely relevant site with real readers is worth more than a high one on a site nobody visits.
How to act on it
Use the scores to triage, not to decide. When reviewing a list of prospective linking sites, look at Trust Flow, the ratio with Citation Flow and the Topical Trust Flow categories together, then visit the site: does it publish real content, have real traffic, and serve an audience you care about? When reviewing your own links, a sudden jump in Citation Flow without Trust Flow following can be a sign of spam links pointing at you.
Judging which links are worth earning, and earning them through content and outreach rather than buying them, is what a sound link building service should be built around.