AI Search: High Usage, Low Trust

Consumer reliance on AI for search has reached a tipping point. Seventy percent of consumers say their use of AI for search has increased over the past year. Fractl found that 70% of consumers said their AI use for search increased over the past year, while only 4% said they have never used AI tools for search, with a quarter of that group increasing their usage significantly. AI is no longer a novelty. For a huge share of your audience, it is now a default starting point for finding information.

The trust picture tells a very different story. A year ago, 82% of consumers said AI search was more helpful than traditional search. That figure has now dropped to 54%, a 28 point fall in just twelve months. A year ago, 82% of consumers said AI-powered search was more helpful than traditional search. By 2026, that number had dropped to 54%, a 28-point decline in sentiment over 12 months. At the same time, the proportion of consumers who now rate AI search as less helpful than traditional search has grown sixfold, from 3% to 17%Over the same window, the share who rate AI search as less helpful than traditional search grew from 3% to 17%, a sixfold expansion of the skeptic camp.

This is the paradox every marketer now has to navigate. People are using a tool they trust less, more often, a pattern that points to habit and convenience rather than growing confidence in the answers it gives. The critical nuance is that trust is declining even as usage rises... People are using a tool they trust less, more, which points to habituation driven by convenience rather than growing confidence in the output.

So how should marketers respond? Visibility in AI search is no longer optional given the scale of adoption, but winning that visibility on trust alone is harder than ever. The strongest path forward is authenticity: content that is genuinely useful, clearly human where it needs to be, and built on real expertise. Encouragingly, the underlying mechanics have not changed as much as the industry narrative suggests. Research shows a strong correlation between traditional organic ranking and AI citation, with 43.2% of ChatGPT's citations going to the page ranking first on Google. Fractl citation research found that 43.2% of ChatGPT's citations go to the page ranking #1 in Google, roughly 3.5× the citation rate of pages outside the top 20 (12.3%). In other words, strong SEO and genuine website authority are still doing most of the heavy lifting. GEO is not a separate discipline to chase from scratch, it is what you get when your existing search and content strategy is done properly.

The Pressure to Adopt AI Is Mounting

It is not just consumers feeling the shift. Marketers themselves report an average pressure score of 6.4 out of 10 to adopt AI across their work, with data and SEO teams under the most pressure at 7.5 and 7.4 respectively. Even the team reporting the lowest pressure, PR and communications, still sits at a notable 5.8.

Leadership is asking marketing teams to do more, with less. Headcount across the industry remains largely flat, yet output expectations continue to rise. That squeeze is exactly why so many teams are turning to AI as the default solution, often faster than they are able to govern it properly.

Faster Output, But Is It Better?

The consequences of that pressure are starting to surface. Nearly half of marketers admit they are not consistently fact-checking AI-generated content before it goes out. She cited the research finding that nearly half of marketers admit to not fact-checking their AI-produced content, and 48% say AI is making their work faster, but more average and that 48% say AI makes their work faster but more average.

That combination should concern any marketing leader. Speed without oversight is precisely what erodes the credibility marketers are trying to build, and "faster but more average" is not a strategy that differentiates your brand when every competitor has access to the same tools.

Disclosure Is a Growing Blind Spot

Consumers want transparency, and they want it consistently. Demand for AI disclosure runs high across every content format, from 84% for written content to 91% for video. Consumers in the survey overwhelmingly wanted AI content labeled across formats: 84% for written content, 91% for video, 90% for images, and 87% for audio. Marketing teams are falling well short of that expectation. Only one in five organisations say they always disclose their use of AI, and a third admit they never do. Only 20% of organizations always disclose AI use to audiences, while 33% never disclose.

That gap carries real reputational risk. The share of consumers who say heavy AI use would decrease their trust in a favourite brand has effectively doubled year on year, from 20% to 40%the share of consumers who say heavy AI use would decrease their trust in a favorite brand doubled from 20% in 2025 to 40% in 2026. Gen Z is the least forgiving demographic of all, with over half saying heavy AI use would damage their trust in a brand they already love. Gen Z showed the highest likelihood of reduced trust: 54% said their trust would decrease if a favorite brand used AI for most marketing, and women are notably more likely than men to penalise brands for it, 44% compared with 34%Women were also more likely than men to penalize heavy AI marketing use (44% vs. 34%). If your audience skews younger or female, this is not a minor detail. It is a strategic risk that needs a governance response, not just a content policy buried in a style guide.

Where GEO Strategy Is Going Wrong

GEO has firmly arrived as a priority, with over half of marketers now naming it as a core part of their strategy. The most-prioritized strategies for offsetting AI’s impact: social platform brand presence (59%), GEO/AEO (54%). The problem is proof. Only 12% of marketers running GEO tactics report measurable results. Only 12% were very confident with measurable results, and many are executing without clear attribution, meaning the vast majority are investing time and budget with little way to demonstrate what is actually working.

Look closer and there is a deeper issue: marketers are prioritising the tactics AI can replicate most easily, while neglecting the ones it can't. The most widely used GEO tactic is FAQ and question based content, deployed by almost half of marketers. Among marketers running GEO tactics: 49% optimize FAQ and question-based content. It is also one of the easiest formats for AI, and your competitors, to reproduce at scale. Meanwhile, original research and proprietary data, arguably the single hardest asset for AI to replicate, is prioritised by just 15% of marketers. The least-prioritized: original research and data, at just 15%. That’s an inversion. Original research is one of the hardest assets for AI to replicate or summarize away.

That inversion is the clearest signal in the entire report. The industry is investing heavily in commodity content while overlooking the one lever that genuinely builds a defensible moat.

What This Means for Your Marketing Strategy in 2026

The brands that come out ahead this year will not be the ones with the most AI embedded in their workflow. They will be the ones who are transparent about how they use it, who back their content with original research and named expertise, and who treat AI as one channel to manage carefully rather than a shortcut around the trust they have spent years building with their audience.

If you're joining us at B2B Marketing Expo US this year, this is exactly the conversation we want to be having with you. Come find us on the show floor to talk through what a trust-first, evidence-backed GEO strategy looks like for your business, and register now to make sure you don't miss it.