The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) released research this morning showing that 56 percent of consumers prefer AI-generated shopping recommendations that include creator or influencer perspectives. Sixty-five percent say they feel more confident in an AI recommendation when credible creator reviews sit behind it.
The study, called The Creator Signal, surveyed 2,200 people in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Mexico and India, all screened for having used AI for shopping research in the previous three months. IAB published it six days before its first CreatorFronts, an invite-only marketplace in New York where platforms, creator marketplaces and measurement vendors pitch media buyers.
Keep that second fact in view. It shapes how the first one should be read.
What The Research Found
The appetite splits hard by age. About 65 percent of Gen Z and Millennials want creator perspectives folded into AI recommendations, against 53 percent of Gen X and 34 percent of Boomers. Among Gen Z, a creator review inside an AI answer carries almost the same weight as brand or advertiser information, 27 percent against 29 percent.
Eighty percent of respondents said they are comfortable relying on AI recommendations at all. That is the number that should stop you before any of the creator findings do.
On which creators people trust, fame finished last:
- Everyday consumers, at 52 percent
- Professional reviewers, at 43 percent
- Subject-matter experts, at 37 percent
On what makes a creator trustworthy enough for an AI system to lean on:
- Credibility, at 46 percent
- Consistency, at 40 percent
- Expertise, at 36 percent
- Independence from brands and clear sponsorship disclosure, at 34 percent
Shoppers see the most value in creator-informed AI when they are hunting for the best price (38 percent), finding products they did not know existed (32 percent), comparing options (31 percent) and boiling down product information (31 percent). India and Mexico showed the strongest appetite of the five markets. The United States led the Western ones. The United Kingdom was the most cautious.
“What we’re seeing is that with AI shopping, consumers don’t just want the recommendation. They want real-world experience and expertise behind the guidance,” said Jack Koch, SVP of Research and Insights at IAB.
Why This Matters If You Sell Anything Online
For twenty-five years the job was to make your own pages rank, because the page was the answer. That arrangement is coming apart in front of us.
Ask an AI assistant which cordless drill to buy and the model is not reading your product page back to you. It is assembling a verdict out of everything it has ingested about cordless drills: YouTube teardowns, Reddit threads, review-site roundups, forum complaints, comparison posts written by people you have never heard of and cannot call. Your marketing copy is one voice in that pile, and it is the voice with the weakest claim on the model’s trust.
Your off-site reputation is now your product copy
This is the shift most brand teams have not budgeted for. You can control your site. You cannot control the twelve-minute video where somebody takes your product apart on a kitchen table, and that video may carry more weight in an AI answer than your entire domain. Visibility inside AI answers now depends on what other people publish about you, in places you do not own, on a schedule you do not set.
That should feel familiar. It is link building’s logic applied to sentiment instead of anchor text, and it rewards what it always rewarded: being worth talking about.
Sponsored and independent look identical to a machine
Thirty-four percent of respondents said independence from brands and honest sponsorship disclosure is what makes a creator worth trusting. Fair enough. Now name the system that can tell the difference at scale.
A paid review and an unpaid one are the same words in the same order. The FTC disclosure lives in a spoken aside at 0:14 or in the fourth line of a video description, and both routinely vanish when the content gets transcribed, scraped, summarized or syndicated. By the time that text reaches a training corpus or a retrieval index, the sponsorship marker is usually gone.
Where The Study Stops Short
I have watched survey findings get sold as market facts for a long time, and this one needs three qualifiers the press release does not supply.
Stated preference is not behavior. People say they want independent expertise the same way they say they read terms of service. What they actually do is buy the first thing the assistant names.
The most-trusted category is the most gamed one. Everyday consumers finished first at 52 percent, and everyday consumer reviews are the single most polluted content type on the internet. The Transparency Company flagged 14 percent of the 73 million reviews it analyzed as fake or highly suspicious, and put the consumer harm from review fraud at $300 billion a year across home services, legal and medical alone. Three percent of those reviews were written by AI, a share that has been growing roughly 80 percent month over month since mid-2023. The people running those operations have already worked out that the audience worth fooling is no longer human. Feed an AI system “authentic everyday consumers” as a trust signal and you have handed them a bigger payday than they ever had in search.
The 72 percent figure needs a footnote. IAB reports that nearly three-quarters of consumers use general-purpose AI assistants for shopping decisions, but the sample here was screened for people who had already used AI for shopping research. The release does not say whether that number comes from this survey or a separate general-population study. The gap between those two readings is enormous, and any marketer quoting the figure in a budget meeting should find out which one it is first.
None of that makes the research wrong. David Cohen, IAB’s CEO, said trust will be a critical differentiator, and he is right. It makes the research a trade association’s opening argument, published a week before the trade association sells influencer inventory to media buyers in Midtown. Read it as evidence, not as a verdict.
What To Do About It
Start by finding out what the assistants already say about you. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity to recommend a product in your category, then ask them to compare your product against your two closest competitors. Write down which sources they name. That list is your new backlink profile, and most brands have never looked at it.
Then go work the sources. Get your products into the hands of reviewers who publish where the models actually read: YouTube, established review sites, active subreddits, category forums with years of archived threads. Make sponsorship disclosure loud and early in the content itself rather than buried in a description field, because clean disclosure is what survives being scraped.
Keep your structured product data correct. Schema markup for price, availability, ratings and specifications is one of the few inputs you fully control, and retrieval systems lean on it when they need a fact rather than an opinion.
The brands that win the next stretch of this will be the ones with the most credible third-party evidence attached to their names, not the ones with the best on-page copy. That is a harder job. It is also a more durable one, because you cannot buy it in a quarter.
IAB’s five markets all agreed on the same underlying point, and it is not really a finding about AI. Shoppers want to know that a person handled the thing before they spend money on it. The machine in the middle is new. What people want from it is very old.