Sixty percent of US consumers say brands that use the phrase 'AI' in their messaging are a turnoff, according to a new WordPress VIP report based on a survey of 2,000 respondents fielded in April 2026. The sample split 800 enterprise decision-makers and CMOs against 1,200 US adults, and the gap between the two groups is the story. Enterprises are pouring budget into AI discoverability while the consumers they're trying to reach are growing more allergic to the label itself.
The trust numbers are sharper still. 86% of consumers say they don't fully trust AI and still want to explore original sources before acting on an answer. 42% rate AI-generated answers without clear attribution as less trustworthy than airline fees, confusing privacy policies, and medical bills, a category of grievance that sets a remarkably low bar. Nearly three in four respondents said the internet feels 'less human' than it did 10 years ago.
On the enterprise side, the incentives run the other direction. 60% of enterprise respondents said traffic from AI search engines and answer platforms increased over the past year. 74% of enterprise decision-makers said AI discoverability and attribution are a main or significant priority, putting the optimization scramble for AI answer engines roughly where SEO sat a decade ago.
Key facts
- 0160% of US consumers say brands using 'AI' in messaging are a turnoff, per a WordPress VIP survey of 2,000 respondents in April 2026.
- 0286% of consumers don't fully trust AI answers and still want to explore original sources.
- 0342% trust AI-generated answers without attribution less than airline fees, confusing privacy policies, or medical bills.
- 0460% of enterprise respondents said AI search referral traffic grew over the past year; 74% rank AI discoverability a top priority.
- 0580% of consumers said web information should remain openly accessible rather than controlled by a few large organizations.
WordPress VIP, the Automattic-owned enterprise arm of the WordPress publishing platform, is positioning the report as a case for content that works for both audiences at once. The company's broader pitch is that brands now have to write for machine readers and human readers simultaneously, and that the two demand different things: AI agents want structured, legible content; consumers want something that signals a person was behind it.
Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP, framed the tradeoff in the report. Sites that aren't machine-legible disappear from AI-mediated search, but sites that lose the human signal don't get repeat visits from the small share of users who do click through.
That click-through share matters because it's where trust gets rebuilt. 33% of consumers said clicking through to see an original source is their top trust signal, ahead of any other cue tested. 80% said information on the web should remain openly accessible rather than controlled by a small number of large organizations, a finding that aligns with Automattic's investments in open web protocols including ActivityPub.
The data sits awkwardly against how the AI search market has evolved. Google Search, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini have trained users to accept synthesized answers without leaving the answer surface. Brands chasing visibility inside those surfaces are optimizing for a channel where the user, by design, never sees them as themselves. The 33% click-through number suggests a meaningful minority is still pushing past the summary, but the majority is not.
There are obvious caveats. A survey commissioned by a WordPress-aligned publisher has a clear interest in findings that favor original-source content and open web protocols, and the methodology details beyond the 2,000-respondent split aren't published. The 'AI in messaging is a turnoff' finding is also sensitive to wording; consumers reacting to the marketing label may still happily use AI products that don't advertise themselves as such.
Still, the directional read is hard to ignore. Enterprises are spending against a channel where their audience trusts the medium less than a hospital bill, and the consumers most willing to click through to verify are also the ones most likely to penalize content that feels machine-written. The companies that figure out how to be cited by AI without sounding like AI will own the next several years of brand-search economics. The ones treating 'AI-powered' as a marketing flourish are paying to repel the 60%.
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