Here’s a number that should make every marketing team pause. Sixty percent of US consumers say brands that use the word “AI” in their messaging are a turnoff, according to a new report covered by TechCrunch AI. The study comes from WordPress VIP, the Automattic-owned enterprise arm of the WordPress platform, and it lands at an awkward moment: brands are pouring money into showing up in AI search results while the people they’re chasing are growing more skeptical by the day.
What stands out here is the gap between what companies are optimizing for and what consumers actually want.
What the survey found
WordPress VIP surveyed 2,000 people in April. The group split into 800 enterprise decision-makers and CMOs, plus 1,200 US adults. That mix lets the report compare what brands are doing against how regular people feel about it.
The consumer trust numbers are blunt:
- 60% say “AI” in brand messaging is a turnoff.
- 86% don’t fully trust AI answers and still want to check original sources.
- 42% trust AI-generated answers without clear attribution less than airline fees, confusing privacy policies, and medical bills.
- Nearly 3 in 4 say the internet feels “less human” than it did 10 years ago.
That last stat is the mood of the whole report. People sense something has shifted, and they don’t love it.
The brand side tells a different story
While consumers pull back, enterprises are leaning in. The report found AI referrals to websites are actually growing, which explains why brands keep pushing.
- 60% of enterprise respondents say traffic from AI search engines and answer platforms rose over the past year.
- 74% of enterprise decision-makers call AI discoverability and attribution a main or significant priority.
So brands aren’t wrong that AI search matters. The traffic is real and climbing. The problem is they’re optimizing for machines while the humans on the other end want proof they can trust what they’re reading.
People used to build websites for other people. Now you have to build websites for AI agents acting on behalf of those people. If your site’s content isn’t legible to AI, you are invisible to a growing share of how people search. You don’t exist. And if your content doesn’t feel human and trustworthy for the tiny percentage of people who actually click past the AI answer engines, they won’t come back a second time.
— Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP
Why it matters
This is significant because it exposes a two-front problem most brands aren’t set up to handle. You need to be readable by AI agents and you need to feel human to the few people who click through. Win one, lose the other, and you’re in trouble either way.
The report points to attribution as the bridge. A third of consumers (33%) said clicking through to an original source is still their top trust signal. And 80% said information on the web should stay openly accessible rather than locked up by a handful of large organizations. That second figure dovetails neatly with Automattic’s own push for an open web, including its backing of open source WordPress and protocols like ActivityPub. Worth keeping in mind when you read the results: the company publishing them has a stake in that open-web future.
What you can do with this
A few practical takeaways for anyone building content or running a brand:
- Drop the “AI” branding. If 60% see it as a turnoff, the label is costing you more than it earns. Sell the outcome, not the technology.
- Make attribution visible. Clear sourcing is the single trust signal consumers named most. Link out, cite, and show your work.
- Write for both audiences. Structure content so AI engines can parse it, but keep the voice human enough that the click-through crowd comes back.
- Treat trust as the scarce resource. AI visibility is getting easier. Earning a second visit is the hard part.
One limitation to flag: this is a single 2,000-person survey from a vendor with a clear point of view, so treat the exact percentages as directional rather than gospel. The direction, though, is hard to ignore. As AI search keeps eating into traditional traffic, the brands that win will be the ones that stay legible to machines without sounding like one. You can find the full breakdown at the original TechCrunch AI report.