Position
Vendor trust is the missing primitive for agentic commerce
Commerce is starting to run through agents. They research vendors, shortlist them, and increasingly choose and transact with them on a person's behalf. Every one of those steps is a trust decision, and an agent making it at speed needs something a human buyer has always improvised: a signal about the other side that it can read and check before it acts.
The gap
The trust artifacts we built for humans do not survive an agent's scrutiny. A questionnaire is self-reported and stale the moment it is filed. A logo wall is a claim, not evidence. A PDF report is a snapshot no machine can re-verify. An agent that has to act cannot tell a real posture from a well-designed page, so it either trusts too easily or stalls and hands the decision back to a human. Neither is the point of giving the work to an agent.
The signal an agent can act on
A vendor-trust signal that works for an agent has four properties.
Witnessed. Read from live evidence, not self-reported. The agent is weighing an observation, not a claim.
Signed. Cryptographically verifiable, so the agent can confirm the signal independently instead of taking a page at its word.
Queryable. Available in one call over a standard interface, so checking a vendor is a step in the agent's loop, not a scraping project.
Honest about absence. When there is no data, the signal says so plainly, so the agent treats a gap as a gap rather than a pass.
This is what Trooth publishes: a witnessed trust profile per company, signed and re-checked on a schedule, queryable by any agent over the Model Context Protocol, with an honest absence where a fact is unknown. An agent can pull it before it recommends, integrates, or transacts, and keep the provenance attached to whatever it decides.
What this is not
A trust signal is not a verdict, and an honest one does not pretend to be. Trooth attests what it witnessed and signs the event; it does not warrant that a vendor is fit for a given purpose, and it does not stand in for the buyer's own judgment. The agent, or the person behind it, still decides whether the witnessed state meets the bar for this deal. The signal exists so that decision is made on evidence with a date on it, rather than on a claim with none.