Getting cited by AI is easier than gaining consumer trust, according to a new report from WordPress VIP, an Automattic-owned company that provides an enterprise version of the WordPress publishing platform. As brands compete to get their links shown in AI search results, consumers are becoming increasingly skeptical about whether they can actually trust the answers they get.
According to the report, 60% of US consumers say they don’t like brands that use “AI” for messaging, and 86% don’t fully trust AI and would still prefer to explore independent sources. Specifically, 42% of consumers say they trust AI-generated answers without clear attribution more than airline fares, confusing privacy policies, or medical bills.
Nearly three in four respondents said they feel the internet is “less human” than it was 10 years ago.
These findings 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 human-authored with the risk of losing their audience. As companies invest more in making their brands visible to AI search engines, consumers are becoming more concerned about transparency and attribution.
“People used to build websites for other people,” Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP, said in a statement shared with the new report. “Now you need to build websites for the AI agents that work on behalf of those people. If your site’s content is unreadable to AI, you will become invisible to the way more and more people search. You won’t exist. And if your content doesn’t feel human and trustworthy to the small percentage of people who actually click past an AI answer engine, they’ll never come back.”
The report is based on a survey of 2,000 respondents (800 business decision makers and CMOs and 1,200 U.S. adults) conducted in April.
Despite consumer wariness about AI, the report also found that AI referrals to sites are on the rise.
60% of enterprise respondents said traffic from AI search engines and answer platforms has increased in the past year, and 74% of enterprise decision makers said AI discoverability and attribution is a primary or key priority.
WordPress VIP says the findings point to a future where brands must navigate both AI visibility and human trust at the same time. According to the report, 33% of consumers said clicking to view the original source remains the biggest trust signal, and 80% said information on the web should remain openly accessible rather than controlled by a few large organizations.
The final discovery is consistent with Automattic’s broader push for the open web ecosystem, reflected in its support of the open source WordPress project and investments in open web protocols such as ActivityPub.
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