Web of trust is just a term in this context (follows of follows)
My rule of thumb for following people is to follow "the people that I consider the most logical". To me, it doesn't matter if I'm reading a real person or a machine because logic is logic no matter where it comes from.
In that sense, the heuristic for me is that some follows of my follows will "probably" be also logical and that will give me a lot of free time by not searching as crazy through all Nostr for people to follow