01
Find out which signal is broken right now. Free.
Five questions. Five minutes. Answer honestly — not the version you are working toward. The version that is currently true.
Run the Five Question Trust Test →New to Esme?
Start here
A brand under investigation. Four signals. One question: would AI recommend you?
Is your brand the one that shows up brilliantly at launches and disappears in between?
The one that means well but never quite follows through?
The one with high standards and no signage, where serious buyers cannot find the door?
The one that gives warmly, but always with an ask attached?
Your audience has noticed. Your prospects have noticed. And those patterns leave evidence behind.
AI recommendation systems don’t evaluate your pitch. They encounter the evidence your brand leaves behind — the gaps, the inconsistencies, the claims nobody can verify — and use it to decide whether you belong in the recommendation.
That decision can shape whether you make the shortlist at all.
What Esme offers
Follow the evidence one step at a time
You can begin free, understand the method, investigate your own brand, or bring Esme in for the full investigation.
- Discover
Five Question Trust Test
Identify which signal deserves investigation first.
Free - Understand
The Trust Signal Mystery™
See how trust patterns form and why they keep repeating.
$9 - Investigate
The Esme Tale Casebook
Learn to recognize broken signals through real investigations.
$19 - Transform
The Trust Signal Diagnostic™
Find what is broken and build a repair that lasts.
From $2,000 - Monitor
Trust Signal Watch™
Keep the repaired signal visible, consistent and current.
From $750/qtr
02
See the evidence in action. Free.
Subscribe and receive the Verdant Diagnostic Notebook immediately.
Verdant Home Goods spent four years building a brand people liked — yet something in the evidence was not adding up.
The notebook gives you a closer look at the case: the evidence Esme examined, the Trust Signal patterns that emerged, and the reasoning that connected the findings.
It is not the full Trust Signal Diagnostic. It is a sample investigation designed to show you what becomes visible when you stop looking at what a brand intended to communicate and start looking at the evidence around it.
Subscribe to get the Verdant Diagnostic Notebook free →03
Read a free Case File
Four free Case Files. Four real brands. Four different signals investigated using the same framework that underpins every Trust Signal Diagnostic. One of them is almost certainly the pattern you recognize in your own brand.
Read the Case Files →04
See where the investigation begins
The Trust Signal Mystery — Chapter 1 free
A business book written as a detective story. Sarah Chen has spent four years building Verdant Home Goods. Customers like it. Reviews are strong. The brand has an audience and recent media coverage. Then traffic falls by 61%.
When Sarah asks three AI systems to recommend sustainable home-goods brands, Verdant appears in none of the answers. Sarah calls Esme Tale.
What follows is an investigation into the gap between the brand Sarah believes she built and the one the evidence is quietly describing.
The problem isn’t what you’re saying. It’s what you’re signaling. And the distance between the two is where businesses go to disappear.Read Chapter 1 free →
The full book is in production. Subscribe to The Trust Signal to hear when it is ready.
05
Investigate your own brand
The Esme Tale Casebook is a self-administered brand investigation. Four signals. Twenty evidence prompts. Verdicts — Guilty, Under Investigation, Not Guilty — based on what you actually find when you look.
It ends with a picture of the brand your audience actually experiences, as distinct from the brand you believe you are running.
The Casebook is in production. Subscribe to be notified when it is available.
06
The full investigation
The Trust Signal Diagnostic — from $2,000
Most audits tell you what is broken. The diagnostic investigates the pattern behind it and builds the repair that lasts.
You receive a written Diagnostic Notebook containing the complete investigation across all four Trust Signals; the AI Recommendation Test across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overview; written analysis of the patterns uncovered; and a sequenced repair roadmap with timelines and measurable outcomes.
Plus a diagnostic session where the findings are presented directly, with both practitioners in the room.
Explore the full Diagnostic →07
Ongoing intelligence after the Diagnostic
Trust Signal Watch™ — from $750/quarter
The Diagnostic gives you the investigation. Watch™ keeps the intelligence current.
Each quarter: a Recommendation Landscape Review across target AI systems, a Signal Status Review with one priority signal investigated in depth, a Movement Summary, a Competitive Intelligence Review, a Risk Alert, and one Priority Action for the next 90 days.
Watch™ Lite$750/quarterIntelligence report and email support
Watch™ Strategic$1,500/quarterIntelligence report and strategy session
Available to brands that have completed a Trust Signal Diagnostic.
Ask about Trust Signal Watch™ →The Five Question Trust Test
Answer from what is currently true
Take the five-question Trust Test using the brand evidence in front of you, not the version of the brand you are working toward. When you finish, you will receive a Trust Test score out of 10 and an initial indication of what may deserve a closer look. Answer honestly, the answers that make you hesitate may be the most revealing.
0 of 5 answered
For each question, choose the answer that best matches what is true today.
- 01
Open your posting history for the last three months. Mark every week you posted and every week something was launching. Are the two patterns independent?
- 02
Open your homepage in an incognito window. After eight seconds, can you say what the brand sells, who it is for, and what to do next?
- 03
List the three most prominent claims on your homepage. Could a stranger independently verify them without taking your word for it?
- 04
Find your last five customer inquiries. Did the response time match the promise your brand makes?
- 05
Find the last piece of content that gave genuine value with no ask attached. Was it recent enough to be part of a pattern?
Start the conversation
Seen a pattern you recognize?
Describe what you are seeing in your brand’s signals. You do not need to diagnose it before you write.