60% of US Consumers Turned Off by 'AI' Branding

Sixty percent of U.S. consumers say seeing the word "AI" in a brand's messaging is a turnoff, according to a survey of 2,000 people run by WordPress VIP, the enterprise arm of Automattic. The April 2026 poll split its respondents between 1,200 U.S. adults and 800 enterprise decision-makers and CMOs — and the striking part is that the two groups are pulling in almost opposite directions.

On the consumer side, the skepticism runs deep: 86% say they don't fully trust AI and want to explore the original sources behind an answer, and 73% feel the internet has become "less human" than it was a decade ago. In one of the survey's blunter findings, 42% said they trust AI-generated answers that lack attribution less than they trust airline fees, confusing privacy policies, or medical bills — not flattering company for a technology marketed as the future.

Companies are chasing the opposite

Businesses, meanwhile, are racing toward AI, not away from it. Sixty percent of enterprise respondents said traffic from AI search engines rose over the past year, and 74% now prioritize being discoverable and cited inside AI answers. WordPress VIP CTO Brian Alvey summed up the shift: "People used to build websites for other people. Now you have to build websites for AI agents." That is the tension in one survey — brands optimizing for the machine while their customers say they'd rather hear from a human.

Why it matters to you

If you use AI to look things up, this is a useful read on where trust actually sits. The same survey found that 33% name clicking through to original sources as their single biggest trust signal, and 80% believe web information should stay openly accessible rather than locked up by large organizations. People aren't rejecting the tools so much as refusing to take an unsourced answer on faith — which is exactly the right instinct.

One survey from a company that sells web publishing isn't the final word, and fatigue with "AI" in marketing copy isn't the same as rejecting the technology underneath it. But the consistent thread — people want to see where an answer came from — lines up with everything else we keep learning: the trust isn't in the AI answer itself, it's in being able to check it.