Why Nobody Trusts What They Read Online Anymore (And What To Do About It)

We've noticed we don't click the AI summary at the top of search results anymore. We just scroll past it to find an actual source. Turns out that's not a personal quirk, it's basically the norm now.

A recent Exploding Topics survey of over 1,100 web users found that 82% of people are at least somewhat skeptical of AI-generated summaries, and only 8.5% say they always trust them. Nearly three in four respondents said they'd personally run into a significant mistake in AI-generated content. And here's the part that should worry anyone in marketing or sales: 74% of people want a pause or reversal in how much AI-generated content is showing up online. That's not a niche opinion anymore. That's most of your audience.

We are actively pivoting our social team's strategy because of this!

It gets more counterintuitive from there. A study out of NIM tested what happens when marketing content is labeled as AI-generated versus not. You'd think honesty would help. It didn't. Content labeled as AI-made got rated as less emotionally engaging and got fewer clicks, even when the underlying content was identical. The researchers called it a transparency paradox: disclosing AI involvement made people trust the content less, not more, because it made them evaluate it more critically.

So what does a business actually do with that. Slapping a label on things doesn't buy you trust, and pretending AI isn't involved anywhere in your process is a bad bet too, given how good people have gotten at spotting synthetic content. The thing that seems to actually hold up is specificity and a real human presence behind the work, not a disclosure checkbox. People trust a named person with a track record more than they trust a policy statement about how content gets made.

We think about this constantly, because content and brand storytelling are core to what we do. The lesson we keep landing on isn't "avoid AI." It's that trust gets built the old way now more than ever: by a real person standing behind the work, willing to put their name on it. Tomorrow we'll get into what that means specifically for how brands connect with real people, where this trust gap shows up loudest.