Why Every Business Needs a Public Library of Customer Experiences
Dan Lievens on why searchable customer stories preserve context, answer buyer questions, and offer more useful evidence than a static testimonial page.
By Dan Lievens, co-owner of Share One. Originally published on LinkedIn on October 7, 2026.
Short answer: A public library of customer experiences preserves the context that short testimonial quotes leave out: who the customer is, what they needed, what worried them, and what happened afterward. Organizing those stories around buyer questions makes them easier for people and search tools to find, without guaranteeing AI citations.
Go to almost any company website and look for the testimonials page. If you can find it, you'll usually see the same thing. A handful of quotes with headshots, maybe a row of logos, and a star rating or two. It was probably put together in an afternoon, and it probably hasn't changed much since.
That page made sense when it was built. Websites were brochures, and a brochure needed a section showing that other people had liked the product. But I've been thinking about how much weight that single page is being asked to carry, and I don't think it can carry it anymore.
The testimonial page was built for a different visitor
A testimonial page assumes the person has already arrived at your site, has been reading for a while, and wants one last bit of reassurance before they reach out. It's a closing tool, and it sits near the end of the process. For a long time that was fine, because most people found a company first and checked it out second.
That order is starting to flip. Someone asking an AI tool a specific question may never see your website at all, let alone your testimonials page. They want the answer to their own situation, something like what it was like for a small team with nobody technical on staff. If your proof lives in four quotes on a single page, it has almost nothing to offer that question.
The page is also curated, which is worth saying plainly. Someone picked those quotes, trimmed them, and cut anything that sounded the least bit uncertain. That's a reasonable thing to do when you're building a brochure. It also means a visitor is seeing the best few moments from what may be hundreds of real experiences, and learning nothing about the ones that were more complicated.
What gets lost when a story becomes a quote
A quote strips out the context, and the context is usually the useful part. Great team, would recommend, tells a reader almost nothing. They can't tell who said it, what was going on at the time, what the person was worried about, or whether that person looks anything like them. Without that, there's nothing to match against.
There's another loss that's easier to miss. Most customers have several useful things to say. One person might talk about how long setup took. Another might explain what they used before, or why the price made them hesitate. On a testimonials page all of that gets squeezed into a single line. Each of those pieces could have been something a future buyer was looking for.
What a library does differently
A library is organized so that things can be found one at a time. Experiences are sorted by the problem someone was solving, the kind of business they run, the questions they had before deciding. A reader, or an AI tool, can go straight to the one that resembles their own situation without scrolling past everything else.
Volume changes what the content can show, too. Someone can read ten stories and start noticing patterns that no single quote could ever reveal. Say forty customers all mention the same hesitation before buying, and most of them describe the same outcome afterward. That repetition carries real weight, and it comes from the customers rather than from anything the company wrote.
It also needs to be public. If the stories sit behind a form, or inside a sales deck that only gets sent to people already talking to you, then neither search engines nor AI tools can reach them, and they only help the people who were already close to buying. I'll be honest that not every company will feel ready to publish everything, and some of the experiences will be mixed. I think that's fine, and probably healthy. A story with a few rough edges tends to be more believable than one without any.
Smaller to start than it sounds
A library doesn't need hundreds of stories on day one. It needs a habit. Ask customers the same handful of questions, keep their own words, and put what they say somewhere it can be found and read. The volume builds slowly over time, and the part that's actually hard is doing it consistently, more than any piece of technology.
This is the thinking behind how ShareOne Reviews is laid out, as a searchable collection of first-person customer stories recorded by Share One reporters, instead of a page of highlights. We're still early, and I'm watching to see which parts of that structure really help people find what they came looking for. I'll share more of what we see as it comes in.