A Trust Gap Is Widening, But You Might Not Be Able to See It

Trust is rising. That's the headline from RepTrak's latest Current Events research, comparing Q4 2024 and Q4 2025 data across global markets. Across nearly every communication channel, from company websites to social media to traditional news, both the Informed General Public and influencers report higher levels of trust than they did a year ago.

But underneath that positive trend, a more consequential shift is taking shape: the trust gap between influencers and the general public is widening.

Influencer trust is increasing faster, across more channels, and by wider margins than the general public's. Both groups are becoming more trusting. But they are moving at materially different speeds, and most communications dashboards won’t flag that divergence until it becomes a risk.

The Data: Same Direction, Different Speeds

RepTrak's Q4 2024 data established a clear baseline: influencers trusted communication channels more than the IGP across the board, with gaps ranging from roughly 7 to 10 percentage points depending on the channel. Company websites and word of mouth led for both groups, while social media channels sat at the bottom of the trust hierarchy.

By Q4 2025, trust had increased for both audiences, but the gaps didn't hold steady. They grew. Influencers now report trust levels 13 to 14 percentage points above the IGP in channels like online advertising, company-owned social media, and social media news. The widening is most pronounced in digital channels, where influencer trust grew by as much as 4 percentage points faster than IGP trust year over year.

Both groups are becoming more trusting, which is encouraging. But the rate of change is diverging, and that divergence has implications that deserve attention.

Why This Dynamic Matters More Than It Looks

When influencer trust outpaces the general public's over a sustained period, three dynamics emerge that most communications dashboards won't flag.

• First, you risk building reputation in an echo chamber. If influencers are engaging more actively with your digital channels, forming opinions earlier, and trusting corporate messaging more readily, your engagement metrics and sentiment scores may look strong. But those signals may not reflect how the broader public perceives you. The IGP, the audience that drives purchase decisions, regulatory sentiment, and long-term brand equity, may be moving more slowly or not at all.

• Second, you risk misallocating channel investment. Strong digital performance among influencers can make paid and owned social strategies look like they're working across the board. But if the IGP isn't responding proportionally, you may be overweighting channels that resonate with a narrower, more digitally engaged audience while underinvesting in the earned and traditional media strategies that still drive mainstream credibility. RepTrak's Q4 2025 data reinforces this: traditional news has become the most desired channel among all audiences, even as it remains only the third most trusted. That gap between desirability and trust demands a more nuanced channel strategy.

• Third, the divergence compresses your recovery window. When influencer trust diverges structurally from the public's, reputation becomes less elastic. If influencer sentiment shifts sharply, whether positively or negatively, the amplification cycle shortens. The mainstream shift can follow faster than expected. In regulated or high-visibility industries especially, the time between an influencer-driven narrative and a public perception shift is narrowing.

What Communications Leaders Actually Need

The fundamental challenge isn't that trust is diverging. It's that most communications teams lack the infrastructure to detect it, diagnose what's driving it, and adjust before it creates instability. This is where RepTrak Compass fits. Compass doesn't just track reputation; it tracks it by stakeholder segment, by driver, and by channel, with the statistical rigor to distinguish real movement from noise.

• Divergence tracking at the reputation level. Compass enables teams to monitor IGP and influencer reputation scores separately and see whether gaps are widening over time, not just at the channel level, but at the driver level. Are influencers' perceptions of Conduct rising faster than the public's? Is Leadership weight shifting among one group but not the other? Those are the questions that move strategy.

• Channel impact attribution. Rather than treating engagement as a proxy for reputation, Compass connects touchpoint exposure, whether earned, owned, paid, or direct experience, to measurable reputation outcomes. You can evaluate whether exposure to owned social media is improving Conduct perception, whether online advertising is lifting Performance scores, and critically, whether influencers are more reputation-responsive to digital exposure than the IGP.

• Distribution-level monitoring. Averages can mask instability. Compass tracks the composition of ambassadors, fence-sitters, and detractors within each stakeholder group. This reveals whether influencer trust growth is driven by genuine ambassador expansion or whether IGP neutrality is quietly masking slow detractor growth, a distinction that matters enormously for volatility management.

• Importance weighting. Not all drivers carry equal weight, and those weights shift over time. Compass shows which reputation drivers are gaining importance among different stakeholder segments, so you can align strategy not just to what people think, but to what they care about most.

From Listening Infrastructure to Risk Management Infrastructure

The shifts between Q4 2024 and Q4 2025 point to a communications environment that is becoming more layered. Word of mouth has overtaken company websites as the most trusted channel globally, traditional news has become the most desired, and audiences are differentiating more clearly between the channels they trust and the channels they find most useful. Influencer and IGP trust are both growing, but at different rates and through different pathways.

For corporate communications leaders, this means that listening tools alone are no longer sufficient. You also need a system that tracks how different stakeholder segments are moving, identifies what's driving those differences, and connects those insights to business outcomes in a way that holds up at the Board level.

That's the difference between managing communications and managing reputation. And in 2026, it's the difference that matters most.