60% of US Consumers Turned Off by ‘AI’ Branding

According to a survey of 2,000 people conducted by WordPress VIP, the enterprise division of Automattic, 60% of Americans think “AI” in a brand’s messaging is a turnoff. The April 2026 poll broke down respondents into 1,200 American adults and 800 enterprise decision makers and CMOs. Interestingly, the two groups seem to be at odds with one another.

Consumers are largely distrustful of AI. 86% say they don’t trust AI and want to investigate the origin of the information they receive, and 73% say the internet has grown “less human” over the last decade. One particularly bold result showed that 42% of respondents trusted AI-generated content without attribution less than they did airport fees, opaque privacy policies, and medical invoices (not a great look for the technology of the future).

1Companies are chasing the opposite

Enterprise, on the other hand, is all about AI. 60% of enterprise respondents saw an increase in traffic coming from AI search engines in the last year, and 74% said they prioritized being indexed and referenced within AI responses. “People used to build websites for other people,” said Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP. “Now you have to build websites for AI agents.” It’s a conflict — brands are trying to appeal to machines, but consumers say they’d prefer to hear from actual humans.

2Why it matters to you

This is a good article to read if you’re someone who uses AI to search for information. According to the survey, 33% of respondents say that checking out the source material is the most important factor in determining whether they trust a piece of information, and 80% believe that information on the web should remain publicly available instead of held hostage by big corporations. Rather than dismissing the technology entirely, consumers are simply demanding transparency; they want to verify information themselves.

Obviously, this isn’t the last word on the subject, and disliking “AI” in marketing materials doesn’t equate to disliking the tech itself. Still, the desire to know where information comes from is consistent with everything we’ve heard lately: trust isn’t in the AI response, but in the ability to verify it.