Being cited by AI is easier than earning consumer trust, according to a new report from WordPress VIP, the Automattic-owned company that offers an enterprise version of the WordPress publishing platform. As brands race to have their links appear in AI search results, consumers have become more skeptical about whether they can actually trust the answers they get.
According to the report, 60% of US consumers say brands using “AI” in their messaging is a turnoff, and 86% don’t fully trust AI and still want to explore original sources. Notably, 42% of consumers said AI-generated answers without clear attribution are trusted less than airline fees, confusing privacy policies and medical bills.
Nearly three in four respondents said the Internet feels “less human” than it did 10 years ago.
Taken together, the results paint a picture of a rapidly evolving digital landscape, where brands are trying to adapt to a world beyond Google Search and traditional SEO, while balancing the need to appear as a human author or risk losing their audience. As companies invest more in making their brand visible to AI search engines, consumers place greater emphasis on transparency and attribution.
“People used to build websites for other people,” said Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP, in a statement shared with the new report. “Now you have to build sites for AI agents to act on behalf of those humans. If your site’s content isn’t readable by AI, you’re invisible to a growing percentage of how people search. You don’t exist. And if your content doesn’t feel human and believable to the small percentage of people who actually get past the AI ​​response engines, they won again.”
The report is based on a survey of 2,000 respondents conducted in April, comprising 800 corporate decision makers and CMOs and 1,200 US adults.
Despite consumer wariness of AI, the report also found that AI referrals to websites were growing.
Sixty percent of companies surveyed said traffic from AI search engines and response platforms increased over the past year, and 74% of business decision makers said AI discovery and attribution is a top or significant priority.
WordPress VIP says the findings point to a future where brands will need to navigate both AI visibility and human trust at the same time. The report found that 33% of consumers said that clicking through to see an original source is still their best signal of trust, and 80% said that information on the web should remain openly available rather than controlled by a small number of large organizations.
The latter finding is consistent with Automattic’s broader push for an open web ecosystem, reflected in its backing of the open source WordPress project and investments in open web protocols such as ActivityPub.
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