Across several published surveys, the ordering comes out the same way. Peer recommendation is trusted most. Vendor websites sit below it. Buyers use a vendor site to identify options and then leave it to verify what they found. Forrester has published on how heavily business firms lean on validation from third-party content.
What this is not
It is not an argument that your site does not matter. A site that fails to make you identifiable removes you from the shortlist before the verification stage exists. The finding is about which job the site does, not whether it has one.
It is also not an argument for collecting reviews as the answer. A review profile is useful in categories that have one. A great many professional services categories do not, and a firm waiting for a review platform to exist is waiting for the wrong thing.
What a firm without reviews can actually do
Verifiability is the underlying property, and reviews are one way of supplying it. Others are available immediately.
Publishing the method in enough detail that a reader could execute part of it themselves is verifiable in a way a claim is not, because the reader can judge it directly rather than trusting a report of it. Stating what you will not do and where you are weak is checkable against how you behave in the first conversation. Naming the limitation on a piece of evidence you present is itself evidence about how you handle evidence.
A buyer running verification is looking for a reason to discount you. Material that supplies its own caveats gives them less to find and less reason to look.
What we take from it
We hold the position that an unverifiable claim is discounted below zero rather than to zero, because finding one causes a reader to reweight the claims around it. The survey evidence that buyers deliberately leave your site to check is the mechanism by which that happens.
It follows that the stronger move for a firm without publishable results is to publish thinking rather than to publish claims. Thinking can be assessed on the page. A claim has to be taken somewhere else and tested, and most of them do not come back.