How Credibly Uses Trustpilot to Give Small Business Owners Confidence, Fast
Opportunity
Credibly's reviews were scattered across multiple sites, making it hard for business owners to find feedback in one place.
Approach
Credibly automates post-funding review requests, amplifying customer feedback across their marketing channels while monitoring their brand's AI search visibility.
Impact
One verified home for customer feedback that reassures merchants, shapes how AI models describe the business, and shows Credibly's own team where to keep improving.
4.8
Trustpilot star rating
2,800+
reviews
176%+
review growth
Fast funding only works if trust moves just as fast
When a small business owner needs capital, they usually need it now. The equipment has broken, the contract needs a deposit, payroll lands on Friday. And the bank has either said no or said "six weeks," which, for a lot of business owners, might as well be the same answer.
Credibly was built for that moment. From offices in Michigan, New York, and Arizona, they have put more than $3 billion to work in over 55,000 small businesses across more than 1,000 industries. Owners can apply online, get approved in as little as two hours, and see funds arrive in as little as four. Their starting principle is that financing is a tool for growth that should fit the unique needs of each business, so the business owner and their goals always come first.
But how do you create that trust? When someone can go from a search result to signed paperwork inside a single afternoon, every bit of reassurance that would normally build slowly has to arrive at once. There is no referral from a friend, no branch manager they have known for years. Just a website, a decision, and very little time.
So how do you help someone feel confident that their business matters to the financing provider?
The proof was real, it was just scattered
Credibly had financed tens of thousands of businesses before it had dedicated resources to direct the owners to. A couple of reviews sat on one site, a couple more on another (fewer than 1,000 in total), scattered across other sites, with nowhere for a prospective customer to find a single place to read about other people's experiences.
For an owner doing ten minutes of research between customers, that thin trail has almost no impact. The cost of it is hard to see, too, because it shows up as an absence: an application abandoned halfway through, or a merchant choosing a competitor's name simply because it was the one they already recognized.
What Credibly needed wasn't more testimonials. It was a record that a cautious borrower would actually trust. That record now runs to more than 2,800 verified reviews at a 4.8 TrustScore, with 90% of customers awarding five stars.
Asking everyone, every single time
That’s what brought them to Trustpilot. On an open platform, Credibly can’t pick and choose which experiences appear, and that is precisely what makes the TrustScore worth something. Anyone can put five glowing quotes on a homepage, but it takes real transparency to let the public see everything: all the reviews, in the real customers' own words.
The approach Credibly takes is straightforward. When a small business owner receives their financing, an automated review invitation goes out asking how it went. Not to a selected few, or to only those who had smooth calls. Everyone, at the same moment in their journey, while the experience is still fresh.
From there, the feedback travels. Trustpilot widgets sit across credibly.com. The TrustScore appears in team email signatures, so a merchant's first message from a representative already carries it. The marketing team uses Trustpilot's image generator to publish review highlights on social. And the 4.8 sits in the headline stats on their homepage, next to $3 billion funded and 55,000+ businesses served, presented as one fact among the others.
Inviting everyone does mean hearing every type of feedback. Credibly took that trade deliberately. A poor experience happens whether or not anyone writes it down, and a written one is the version you can actually do something about. So the reviews became an operating input as much as a marketing asset, telling the team where the process had left customers unsure and allowing Credibly to do the repair.
"It's one thing to have great products, people, and processes – it's another to have customers validate them in their own words," says Connor Osborn, Digital Marketing Lead at Credibly. "Trustpilot reviews give prospective clients authentic proof as they research financing, while giving us crucial feedback to continuously improve. It's been an invaluable asset for building long-term trust."
Building trust in the age of AI
The way people look for financing is changing quickly. Search "small business loans online" today, and an AI-generated overview may answer before you reach any lender's website, naming a shortlist and summing each one up in a line or two.
Which raises a question most brands have not reached yet. When a machine compresses your entire reputation into one sentence, what does it say?
Credibly's team watches this closely, tracking how the brand surfaces across the major LLMs and AI search formats. Nobody gets to write those summaries. But they are assembled from what the open web says about a company, and a large, current body of verified reviews is one of the clearest signals available. Keeping that record growing, and keeping the score visible wherever merchants happen to look, is how Credibly makes sure the description matches the business its customers actually experienced.
Small business owners trust other small business owners
A pattern runs through Credibly's reviews that no marketing team could have written. Customers name the person who helped them. Not "great service" but an account of who picked up the phone and what they explained. That kind of detail is common for small local firms and far rarer for a national lender.
It is also what a nervous borrower is really looking for. Not a claim, but the experience of someone in their position: Another owner looking for money quickly, was not sure who to trust, and needed a deal that would help them grow.
"Credibly aims to be a true partner for small business owners working to build their dreams," says Osborn. "Because navigating business financing can be overwhelming, seeing other entrepreneurs secure capital and successfully scale their businesses gives them the confidence to choose Credibly as their growth partner."
Conclusion
Credibly's reputation was never in question with the customers it had already served. It simply had nowhere to keep the proof. By inviting every funded merchant to describe their experience and letting that record stand unedited, the company built something more useful than a marketing claim: Evidence a small business owner can check in the few minutes they have.