A new survey is delivering an uncomfortable message to the marketing departments betting their budgets on artificial intelligence: most American shoppers do not want to hear about it.
According to research from WordPress VIP, roughly 60% of US consumers say that seeing the term "AI" in a brand's messaging is an outright turnoff. The finding, reported by TechCrunch, lands at a moment when companies are racing to weave generative AI into everything from customer service chatbots to product descriptions and search results.
A Growing Disconnect
The survey points to a widening gap between corporate strategy and consumer sentiment. On one side, businesses increasingly view AI-powered search — the kind of conversational answers served up by tools like ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, and other assistants — as a critical new referral channel. As more people ask chatbots for recommendations rather than scrolling through traditional search results, brands want to make sure they show up in those AI-generated answers.
On the other side sit consumers who appear skeptical of AI-generated content and wary of brands that lean too heavily on the buzzword. Slapping "AI-powered" on a product or splashing it across an ad campaign, the data suggests, may do more harm than good.
Why the Skepticism?
The wariness is not hard to understand. AI-generated answers have a well-documented habit of producing confident-sounding errors, sometimes called hallucinations. Shoppers who have been burned by inaccurate chatbot responses or who distrust automated content may read "AI" as shorthand for lower quality, less human, or less trustworthy.
There is also a fatigue factor. After a couple of years of relentless AI hype across nearly every industry, the term has lost some of its shine. What once signalled innovation can now read as a marketing cliché — or worse, a red flag that a company is cutting corners on real human work.
The Marketing Tightrope
The results leave companies walking a fine line. Many are investing heavily in AI behind the scenes to power search visibility, personalization, and efficiency. But the survey suggests the smart play may be to use the technology quietly rather than trumpet it in customer-facing copy.
In other words, consumers may be perfectly happy to benefit from AI tools as long as brands do not keep reminding them that a machine is involved. The challenge for marketers becomes capturing the referral traffic that AI search promises without alienating the very customers they are trying to reach.
What It Means Going Forward
The WordPress VIP findings add to a growing body of evidence that the public's relationship with AI is complicated. People are using these tools in record numbers, yet remain uneasy about how they are deployed — especially when it comes to the brands they buy from.
For businesses, the takeaway is clear: AI may be a powerful engine, but it is not necessarily a selling point. The future of AI in marketing might depend less on showing it off and more on making it invisible.
Source: TechCrunch
