WordPress VIP released a report analyzing consumer attitudes toward artificial intelligence in digital media. The report used an April survey of 2,000 respondents, which included 800 enterprise decision-makers and chief marketing officers (CMOs) along with 1,200 U.S. adults.

The findings indicate that 60% of surveyed U.S. consumers perceive brands negatively if those brands use "AI" in their messaging. Eighty-six percent of consumers surveyed stated they do not fully trust AI and prefer to consult original sources. Additionally, 42% of consumers reported trusting AI-generated answers without clear attribution even less than they trust airline fees, confusing privacy policies, and medical bills.

About 75% of respondents indicated the internet feels less human compared to a decade ago. Among enterprise respondents, 60% observed an increase in traffic from AI search engines and answer platforms over the past year. Seventy-four percent of enterprise decision-makers identified AI discoverability and attribution as a main or high priority.

Thirty-three percent of surveyed consumers identified clicking through to an original source as their primary trust signal. Eighty percent of consumers surveyed stated that web information should remain openly accessible rather than controlled by a few large organizations. Brian Alvey, CTO of WordPress VIP, discussed the implications for websites. He said, "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. 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."

WordPress VIP is an enterprise publishing platform owned by Automattic. Automattic supports the open source WordPress project and invests in open web protocols including ActivityPub.

No independent assessment of WordPress VIP’s claims was available.