*Result*: Trust‐Based Secure and Efficient Routing in Mobile Ad‐Hoc Networks Using Heuristic Optimization Strategy With Stacked‐Gated Recurrent Unit.

*The study employs a novel trust‐aided routing approach that employs a stacked gated recurrent unit (SGRU) to estimate the node's trustworthiness in mobile ad‐hoc networks (MANETs). In this designed model, an optimal path for effective routing is selected by the hybrid golf optimizer with walruses behavior‐based optimization algorithm (HGO‐WBOA), which is the combination of both golf optimization algorithm (GOA) and walruses behavior optimization algorithm (WBOA). The effectiveness of routing is enhanced by considering some multi‐object constraints such as remaining energy, throughput, trust, path loss, packet energy cost, security, battery, routing overhead ratio, bandwidth, link cost, end‐to‐end delay, hop count, and packet delivery ratio (PDR) during the optimization process. This designed SGRU identifies security threats and provides an alternate node by removing the attack node to guarantee the integrity of the network. The numerical validations are performed with some traditional energy efficiency routing approaches in MANET. The throughput of the recommended HGO‐WBOA‐SGRU is 95%, which is greater than the previous approaches, such as COA‐SGRU (88.5%), LOA‐SGRU (94.5%), GOA‐SGRU (84%), and WBO‐SGRU (93%), respectively, for the 200th node value. The outcomes prove the effectiveness of the designed approach in recognizing and reducing security threats while also enhancing energy efficiency and routing performance. The novelty of the proposed approach lies in its integration of SGRU with trust‐aided routing, enabling adaptive and accurate trust estimations in dynamic network conditions. This innovative framework allows the model to capture complex relations among nodes and adapt to dynamic network conditions, offering reliable and robust solutions for secure routing in MANETs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]*