Burden Of Proof: Why Users Don’t Trust AI Search, And How Publishers Must Respond

AI’s apparent takeover of search has been swift, widespread, and all-consuming for users, but if the results of a recent poll are any indication, that use “hasn’t translated into trust.”

Only 15% of those recently surveyed by Yelp trust the information provided by AI-powered search tools “a lot,” with nearly two-thirds (63%) double-checking results with other sources.

 

Top 50 US News Websites: Half Of Sites See Traffic Fall 20% Or More In A Year

Almost half of the 50 biggest news sites in the US saw traffic drop by 20% or more year on year in April, according to the latest Similarweb data. Some 24 sites lost a fifth or more visits in April compared to the same month last year. The biggest traffic decline year on year was recorded by Newsweek, which saw traffic fall by 69% to 28.5 million visits.

 

Stanford’s AI Index: 53% Adoption, 31% Trust

Stanford HAI released its 2026 AI Index, showing … public trust in AI sitting at record lows and entry-level workers already losing jobs. … The expert-public divide is a timely stat, given the current anti-AI climate playing out in scary ways. AI insiders see a productivity boom, but regular people aren’t buying it, and just 31% [of] Americans trust the government to manage the changes.

 

Email Absorbs AI: Most Senders Are Using It, But At Different Levels 

One thing is for sure: AI is speeding up email creation. … They are using AI not only for the flashy stuff, but for more mundane tasks like image resizing and link-checking. Overall, 76% of marketers now produce and send marketing emails within three days.

Locally Grown: New Forecast Showing Local Advertising Revenue Boom

Publishers banking on local ad revenue have good news as we settle into Q2, with revised 2026 projections showing 8.1% YoY growth to a total of $184.5 billion.

“The increase over the prior estimate of $181.7 billion is driven by stronger-than-expected performance in mobile (particularly social), video, and streaming, political ad spend, and advertising technology,” says last month’s BIA Advisory Services press release.

 

Times ‘Fewer, Better Stories’ Strategy Leads To Run Of Audience Growth

The Times says a strategy of publishing “fewer, better stories” has led to three consecutive months of record-breaking global audience growth. The Times news desk has reduced the number of stories it publishes by 20% since the mindset change while the sports desk cut its output by 30%. But deputy head of digital Anna Sbuttoni said “they didn’t lose any audience. In fact, they gained it.”

 

Visible AI in Marketing Is Four Times More Likely To Cost Brands Trust Than Build It

When consumers notice AI-generated content in brand marketing, they’re four times more likely to trust the brand less than more, 31% versus just 7%, according to a December 2025 survey from Klaviyo and Datalily. 

 

Text Reflex: Gen Z, Millennials Opt In For Messages, But Want Limits 

Texting is increasingly popular among consumers, at least those in the lower age brackets, judging by a study from SimpleTexting. Of 1,400 Gen Z and millennial consumers surveyed, 69% have opted in to brand texts in the past year. But they are placing limits on it—90% want to receive messages once a week or less.

Trust The Process? Ads In AI Search Make Users Trust Results Less (New Report)

I previously wrote about advertising in AI search when the conversation was regarding whether AI ads were worth prices that neared premium NFL cost-levels.

Around the same time, Claude was making headlines of its own for its ChatGPT-taunting Super Bowl ads, envisioning a world in which the chatbots interjected in evermore creepy ways.

While the ROI worthiness of AI search ads remains yet to be fully determined, what’s absolutely worth considering now is how users regard such commercial breaks.

 

AI Tools For Journalists, And How To Avoid ‘Brain Death’

Many journalists use AI a huge amount in their daily job, with some harnessing exotic AI tools for their reporting, British journalists told Press Gazette. Research by the Thomson Reuters foundation shows that 53.4% of journalists express fears about AI and its impact on ethics and journalism — but at the same time, 81% use it daily.

 

2026 LinkedIn Ads B2B Benchmarks Report

LinkedIn Ads continue to generate the strongest ROAS among the major ad networks. Since last year, LinkedIn ROAS has increased from 113% to 121%. This change reinforces what we already knew. LinkedIn is still the only platform to deliver a positive return for B2B marketers. 

 

Small Businesses See Social Media As Their Clearest Path To Growth In 2026

68% of small-business owners in select countries say social media posting and paid ads will drive the most value for their business in 2026, more than any other channel, according to a survey from Constant Contact.

Unexpected Traffic: Of Course, AI Search Is Expected To Grow … But So Is SEO!

It’s pretty rare to see positive numbers associated with traditional SEO these days. 

Yet actual recent projections from Branch have web traffic from traditional SEO up 8 percentage points (45% last year to 53% for 2026). Alongside it, traffic from AI search is expected to grow from 35% to 50%. 

 

State Of Journalism 2026

AI usage continues to grow. Just 18% of journalists say they use none of the listed tools, down from 23% last year, meaning adoption has risen from 77% to 82%. 

 

Text Tide: Consumers Prefer SMS Over Email For Mobile Interactions

Email has slipped — at least slightly — in the mobile media mix, according to one measure in the 9th Mobile Consumer Insights Report from Vibes. Of the consumers polled, “41% say they’re more likely to redeem digital wallet offers sent to them via text message than sent through email or made available to them in a brand’s mobile app,” the study says. 

 

CMO Navigator: Rethinking Marketing In The Age Of AI

Almost half of CMOs lack confidence in their organization’s ability to implement some of the strategies they deem most important. CMOs report being more confident when it comes to AI adoption as a measure to enhance effectiveness and generate savings, but they seem less confident when it comes to generating net new value out of AI capabilities.

Increasing AI In Advertising: Why Consumer And Advertiser Perceptions Are ‘Out Of Sync’

I recently wrote about a study pitting human- and AI-generated ads against one another to see which had the highest click-through rates. (The winner? AI ads, so long as they didn’t look like AI ads.)

Consumer behavior and perception, particularly as it contrasts with that of advertisers, is at the center of a separate IAB study with Sonata Insights, which found that their “perceptions are increasingly out of sync.”

 

Where Do Americans Turn First For Information About Breaking News?

When Americans look to learn more about a breaking news event, they turn to a variety of sources. This mirrors the fragmented way that people get news and information more broadly these days.

 

Love To Hate Email: Consumers Like It, But Find It Annoying

Consumers are of two minds regarding email marketing. Email is their preferred digital marketing channel. But it is also the one that irritates them the most, judging by a new study from Optimove.

 

Retail Executives Say Gen AI Will Weaken Brand Loyalty

44% of retail executives worldwide expect gen AI to weaken brand loyalty by shifting consumer choice toward value and fit over brand recognition by 2026, according to a report from Deloitte.

Reasons Behind The Results: AI Overviews Relying Less On Search Engine Results (New Report)

Last July, Ahrefs studied the search results from both traditional and AI models, finding that more than three-quarters (76%) of the citations in nearly 2 million AI Overviews were pulled from pages that ranked in the top 10, showing a “major crossover” between search rankings and citations.

Less than a year later, now with 4 million Overviews and more than 863,000 keyword SERPs as part of Ahrefs’ research, that percentage has fallen to 38%, indicating that Google “is selecting far fewer pages straight from the original SERP.”

 

The 2026 Industry Pulse Report

61% of experts are excited about the rise of generative AI in digital media and the opportunities it unlocks for new, scalable ad environments. Yet 53% say adjacency to AI-generated content will be a top challenge in the coming year.

 

The AI Strategy Shift Is Here — And Your Brand Can’t Afford To Wait.

Differences between executives and day-to-day practitioners threaten progress in AI deployment. Both groups agree on broad priorities for AI investments — personalization, customer satisfaction, and workflow automation — but their views on readiness, impact, and performance diverge in consistent ways.

 

Sales And Marketing By Design: The Two Sides Are Mostly Aligned At SMBs

Email marketers and other professionals serving go-to-market teams at SMBs are doing better than you might think. … Companies tolerate ineffective tech stacks because they fear disrupting current systems, while 34% cite data migration challenges. And 35% blame their leadership for being hesitant to execute a change in tooling. 

Newsletter Needs: What Readers Want Most In Their Email Newsletters

Nowadays, the news is hard to avoid.

But when we’re actually seeking news, the variety of sources only continues to expand, with even AI now becoming part of Google’s headline-generating process.

Those who use management software such as Magazine Manager know the ease of sending email-newsletter campaigns, and with the recent results of a Pew Research Center survey showing 30% of American adults get news at least sometimes from such newsletters, the beneficial value of these newsletters is harder to deny.

 

Do AI Ad Creatives Actually Convert?

Across the full dataset, AI-generated ads performed comparably to human-made ads in terms of click-through rate. … When ad performance was segmented by perceived artificiality, a clear trend emerged: AI-generated ads perceived as human-made achieved the highest CTR of all groups.

 

The Content Gauntlet: Budgets Are Rising, But Hurdles Remain

Email teams that are also tasked with content creation will soon be getting busier, judging by The State Of Content Creation, 2026 Edition, research from Canto … and conducted by Ascend2. Of the brands polled, 81% expect their content budgets to increase this year, 29% significantly and 52% moderately. 

 

2026 State of Loyalty & Retention

Subscriber retention is the next unlock, and it’ll help you turn new customers into regulars. The main reason shoppers stay subscribed to marketing messages is to be notified of sales or promotions, but it’s not the only reason.

50/50 And Fair: Publishers Moving Forward With AI Licensing Deals

From its leadership on standing up against Big Tech companies not wanting to pay for publisher content to its longstanding efforts in showcasing the value of news and magazine media, the News/Media Alliance has long been a guiding light for publishers. 

That work has only continued even stronger in the AI era, with the trade association calling out illegal AI scraping and supporting responsible AI by asking Washington to require compensation, transparency, attribution, and general AI practices that ultimately aren’t anti-competitive.

NMA’s next step in this brave new AI world has just been announced, as the group is now partnering with Bria to give its members an AI licensing agreement they may opt into, which would put them into what Digiday says is a 50/50-split revenue share system based on the degree Bria uses their content.

 

Independent Study Finds Public Engagement Drops When Public Notices Leave Newspapers

A recently released academic study has found measurable declines in public engagement after local governments were allowed to move legally required public notices from newspapers to government-run websites. … The study provides the first systematic empirical analysis of what happens when a state removes longstanding requirements that public notices be published in newspapers.

 

2026 Media Effectiveness Benchmarks

Strategic channel allocation is about managing uncertainty as much as maximizing returns. [This] data provides not just ROI benchmarks but uncertainty benchmarks — enabling truly risk-adjusted decision-making for the first time in marketing analytics.

 

Opt-In Courtship: Getting Consumers To Sign Up For Email And Text

Consumers may be getting jaded. While 71% report an increase in marketing emails and 63% in text messages, their attention spans are not exactly surging, judging by “The Art of The Opt-In,” a new study by Intuit Mailchimp, conducted by Ascend2. The challenge for marketers is: How do you get them to opt-in?

Traffic Woes: The Cost Of Invalid Traffic On Advertising Campaign Performance

Whether it’s from bots or from scrapes, from clicks that were accidental, or from clicks of whatever other ingenuine intent, invalid traffic has a cost.

In fact, according to The Global Invalid Traffic Report 2026 from Lunio, at the average IVT rate of 8.51%, that cost was as much as $63 billion last year, a number expected only to increase with “the rise of AI agents and more sophisticated bot traffic.”

 

Few Say Americans Have A Responsibility To Pay For News

How news is funded is central to the sustainability of journalism, yet most Americans do not see paying for it as their responsibility. … Our findings reflect a recurring theme: Americans value being informed, but they feel a limited obligation to contribute financially to the system that produces the news.

 

After The AI Shift: What Marketers Are Prioritizing In 2026

A majority of marketers (nearly 80%) report a positive impact from AI. In fact, only 6% indicate declining performance in the last year due to AI. The results indicate that there is no longer a perceived risk in using AI, and marketers are not debating the merits of AI usage. But what marketers mean by “improved performance” matters. For most, AI didn’t lead to increased ROI. 

 

The Agentic Effect: B2B Firms Face Up To The AI Future

Most B2B brands have adapted or are rolling out Agentic AI. And they think they are pretty good at it despite certain hurdles, judging by The 2026 State of Agentic AI in B2B GTM, a study from Revsure, conducted by Ascend2.

Rolling The AI Dice: The Truth About Probability And Consistency In AI Search Answers

We may never know exactly how the AI sausage is made.

But for those who love a walk-through of how good ol’ fashion research is still conducted — in this case, on whether AI search recommendations are consistent, through the beauty of brute-force experimentation — SparkToro has a step-by-step breakdown like none other.

 

Local Media Industry Looks to Optimize Cross-Platform Ad Growth in 2026 Amid Subscription Plateau

The findings reveal that 72% of publishers saw digital revenue up or flat in 2025, and 85% expect similar growth in 2026. At the same time, subscription challenges surged dramatically with a 383% year-over-year increase in those citing subscriptions as a top challenge.

 

Marketers Plan Biggest Ad Boosts In Digital, Social, CTV – AI, Influencer, Retail Lag

For all the hype surrounding ad-supported AI, influencer marketing, and retail media coming into this year, marketers are most bullish on increasing their spending on good old digital display and video advertising and social media platforms, according to the just-released sixth semiannual edition of a survey of thousands of marketing pros by agency and media-processing tech platform Mediaocean.

 

GEO Readiness Report:
How Marketers Are Embracing AI Search Disruption

95% of respondents say it is important or very important for their content to show up in AI search, and they are diving into GEO with strategic urgency. 72% of those in the beginning stages say their timeline for fully implementing their GEO strategy is six months.