How Trust Cue rates accounts

What we read

Only public posts. Trust Cue looks at what an account has posted and re-posted publicly on X — it does not access your private session, read DMs, or see anything you haven't. It never posts for you.

Every account runs through the same five checks. The checks are automated; no one decides a rating by hand, and the rules don't bend for any account.

The five checks

Each rating is built from five checks. The check names are stable — they mean the same thing on every account so you can compare one to another. What changes per account is the evidence behind each one.

1. Subject depth

   Does the account actually know the topic they post about — real methodological or domain substance — or are they performing expertise? We weigh the depth of the substance, not the volume of the posts.

2. Original framing

   Do they add their own framing, or mostly boost and re-post others? Amplification is fine, but an account that only forwards other people's work reads differently from one that reasons in its own voice.

3. Sticks to the facts

   Do the claims hold up against the public record — sources, dates, links — and do they correct themselves when wrong? An account that hedges honestly and links its evidence scores higher than one that overstates.

4. Upfront about their stake

   Are they upfront about what they have at stake? Selling a course in your domain isn't low-credibility — undisclosed promotion is. This check flags shill and pump patterns, not the mere existence of a product.

5. Who engages with them

   Who engages with them, and who do they amplify? We look at the accounts they actually interact with, not just names they drop. An unread network is a gap in our evidence, not a flaw in the account — so this check never lowers a rating on its own.

Evidence or it doesn't count

Every check is bound to a verbatim quote from a real public post. If we can't point at the post that supports a signal, the signal isn't claimed. A quote proves the account said something; scoring weighs that quote against the rest of what they've posted, so a single cherry-picked line can't flatter a check the broader record doesn't bear out.

Why a high rating is hard to earn

The top rating — "Checks out" — means the public record backs the account up. It is deliberately hard to reach:

• Trust cap on thinner reads. When a check can't be run at full strength and falls back to a stricter, rule-based read, the rating can land at most at "Mixed picture" — it can never say "Checks out" off a fallback. We won't hand out the strongest word on thinner evidence.
• Undisclosed-promotion cap. If an account quietly sells what it posts about — undisclosed promotion, pump patterns — the rating is capped at "Thin support" before anything else is considered. Strong content can't read as trustworthy when the author has a hidden stake.
• "Not enough yet" is separate from "Be careful." A private or newly-joined account with too little public posting reads as low-information, not as bad. We refuse to rate rather than guess.

When we can't rate, we say so — and it's free

If there isn't enough public posting to rate an account fairly, Trust Cue says "Too little to tell" honestly instead of inventing a verdict. And that check doesn't use one of your ratings — you never pay to learn we couldn't read enough.

What ratings are not

A Trust Cue rating is an automated signal from public posts. It is not an endorsement of the person, not a character verdict, and not financial advice. "Checks out" means the public record supports what they post — it doesn't mean you should act on it, and it says nothing about them as a person outside of what they've posted.

The 48-hour freshness rule

Ratings reflect the public record at the moment they were made. A saved rating stays valid for 48 hours, after which it expires — because an account can post a lot in two days, and a stale verdict is worse than an honest "rate it again." Re-checking refreshes with the latest public signals. This is also why a shared link never serves a stale judgment: share pages only show ratings that are still fresh and were made under the current rules.

Same rules for everyone

There is no per-account tuning, no override, and no human in the loop. Every account gets the five checks, the evidence-binding rule, and the caps above — including the brand's own accounts. If the rules ever change, the change is documented here in the same place, and prior ratings are invalidated automatically so no one reads an old verdict under new rules.