Summarize with AI
You can use a customer's logo on your website when that customer has said yes in writing, and the safest strip shows only customers who said yes and who pay you. A logo is the customer's trademark, and putting it under your headline tells a stranger they chose you, so many customer contracts forbid it unless they agree first. This is not legal advice: read your own contracts, and ask a lawyer if a deal is large.
This matters more than it looks. A logo strip is one of the first things a visitor reads as evidence of size, and it only works while every name on it would confirm it. You know which of those teams pay, which ran a trial and which signed up once. A stranger does not, and the one person who will find out first is someone at the company whose logo you used.
Six logos under Trusted by teams at
Here is an example, invented for this post. A seed-stage AI startup checks freight invoices against contracts for logistics teams. The hero reads Stop overpaying on freight. Under the Book a demo button sits a grey row labelled Trusted by teams at, with six logos.
Two of the six are paying customers with signed order forms. One is a pilot that ended in August and did not convert. One is a design partner who gives feedback every other week but has never signed anything. The last two came from the signup list. Someone on the team scrolled through free plan accounts, saw two work email addresses at well known shippers, and added those logos because the row looked thin with four.
Nothing on the page says which is which. To a visitor, all six read the same way: six companies that picked this tool and stayed.
The email that asks who approved it
On a Tuesday an email arrives from the brand team at one of the shippers. It is short and polite. It says their logo appears on the site, asks who approved it, and asks for it to come down. The person who signed up on the free plan was an analyst testing tools on a Friday afternoon. Nobody in that brand team had heard of the startup until a colleague forwarded the page.
Watch what the founder does next. He takes the logo down within the hour and replies with an apology. Then he spends the evening going through the other five, messaging contacts to ask if the logos are fine, and deletes two more before morning. The strip goes from six to three in a day, and the analyst who signed up stops replying to product emails.
Here is the part most advice misses. A shorter strip costs almost nothing. A takedown costs the thing the strip was meant to build. The shipper now knows the startup as the company that used its name without asking. If that shipper was ever going to be a customer, the first conversation will start with that. And a founder who sells into logistics is selling into a small world where brand and procurement people talk.
It reaches the raise too. Across all sectors, the median gap from seed to Series A is around 616 days, and roughly 70 percent of seed companies never raise a Series A. An investor who reads the deck will open the site, and the logos are the easiest thing on it to check. One call to a portfolio company that uses the same shipper, and a logo with no deal behind it becomes a question about everything else in the deck. Our post on what investors look at on your website covers the rest of what gets checked.
What your contracts probably already say
Before you ask anyone, read what you already signed. Many customer agreements have a short clause about publicity or the use of names and marks. It usually sits near the end, under a heading like Publicity, Marketing or Use of Names. Some say neither side may use the other's name or logo without prior written consent. Some give you the right to list the customer by name but not to use the logo. Some are silent.
Check three places. Your own terms of service, which may give you a right to name customers that most free users never read. Any order form or master agreement a larger customer sent you, which often overrides your terms and often says no. And the customer's own brand guidelines, which can say how their logo may be shown even when you have a yes.
If a contract says written consent, an email from your main contact may not be enough. The person who uses your product every day is rarely the person who can approve use of the company's brand. Ask who can, and get the yes from them.
Free plans, pilots and the rule worth holding
Most advice says to show every recognisable company that uses your product, because early on you need all the proof you can get. For a logo strip, that advice is wrong. A work email on a free plan is one person at a company, not the company. A pilot that ended is a trial that did not lead to a purchase. Putting either under Trusted by makes a claim about a relationship that does not exist.
So here is the decision rule. A logo goes in the strip only if two things are true: they pay you, and someone who can speak for their brand said yes in writing. Everything else gets a different, honest treatment, or nothing.
- Paying and approved: logo in the strip, and ideally a named line about what changed for them.
- Paying but not approved yet: leave the logo out. Ask, and in the meantime describe them without the name, such as a top ten freight forwarder in Europe, if your contract allows that.
- Live pilot with a yes: show it under an accurate label, such as Piloting with, not Trusted by.
- Ended pilot, design partner with no contract, free plan users: no logo. If they helped, thank them in a changelog or a launch post, with their permission.
Quotes have stricter rules than logos
A quote with a name on it is an endorsement, and endorsements have rules in the markets you sell into. In the US, the FTC's Endorsement Guides, revised in 2023, say an endorsement must reflect the honest opinion of the endorser, and that a connection such as payment or free product should be disclosed when it would change how people read the quote. In the UK, the CAP Code says marketers must hold documentary evidence that a testimonial is genuine, and must not feature a testimonial without permission.
In practice that means three habits. Keep the email where the customer approved the exact words. Do not edit a quote after approval without asking again. And if a customer got a discount, a free year or anything else for saying it, say so near the quote. Rules change and they differ by country, so check the current versions before you publish, not after.
A permission request they can answer in one line
Do not ask can we use your logo. That question goes to legal, sits in a queue and often comes back as no, because nobody knows what they are agreeing to. Send something specific that the right person can approve in one reply.
A short version, to adapt: we would like to show your logo on our homepage in a row of customers, next to five others. It will appear as in the attached screenshot, in grey, linked to nothing. We would also like to use this sentence with your name and title, word for word. Can you confirm, or tell us who can? If you ever want it removed, reply to this email and it will be down the same day.
Attach the screenshot. Name the page. Put the removal promise in writing. People approve a finished picture far more easily than an open request, and you now hold the written yes the contract asks for.
What to show while the strip is short
A row of three logos you can defend reads stronger than six you cannot, but it can also look thin. The fix is not more logos. It is proof that belongs to you and needs nobody's approval.
We saw this on our website for Chariot, a speech AI research lab whose models were still in private enterprise access when the site was built. The page makes its case with things the lab owns. It says Chariot is one of four teams selected under the IndiaAI Mission to build foundation models, names where the researchers came from, and shows evaluation panels such as median time to first audio. None of that needed a customer's brand team to sign off.
You have your own version. A one line customer count by type, such as used by freight teams at four carriers and two forwarders, with no names. A dated usage number with a definition. The founders' track record. A short write-up of one customer who agreed to be named. If you have no paying customers yet, our post on social proof for startups with no customers covers that stage. This is the stage after it: the proof exists, and you need it on the page without a takedown email.
The logo audit, this week
- List every logo and every named quote on your site. Next to each, write two things: do they pay, and where is the written yes.
- Take down anything with a no in either column today. Do it before anyone asks.
- Read the publicity clause in your terms of service and in every customer contract you signed. Note which ones need written consent and from whom.
- Send the one line request, with a screenshot, to each paying customer you want on the page.
- Change the label to match the truth. Trusted by for paying customers, Piloting with for live pilots.
- Keep a single file of approvals, with the date and the exact wording each person agreed to.
Every logo on that page stands for a customer relationship that lives in your inbox, your contracts and your call notes. You know which ones are real. A stranger only knows what the page tells them, so the page has to hold up when someone checks.
Studio Maydit designs websites for AI founders in the US, UK and Europe, and a lot of that work is making the proof on a homepage match the company the founder has built, without overclaiming it. We work in Framer, Webflow and custom code, in fixed scopes of three to four weeks, and the website design service page shows what a project covers. If your logo strip has names on it you would not want a prospect to ask about, book a 30 minute call with Studio Maydit.
