Consumers use AI search more every month — and trust it less. That reshapes the AI-visibility job.

What the study found

The Fractl and Search Engine Land research, reported June 17, 2026, surveyed 1,008 US consumers and 150 marketers during Q2 2026. The headline numbers:

• Usage is still climbing: 70% of consumers say they're using AI tools for search more than they did a year ago.
• But perceived helpfulness collapsed: a year ago 82% said AI-powered search was more helpful than traditional search; by 2026 that was down to 54%.
• Brand trust is now on the line: in 2025, 20% of consumers said heavy AI use would reduce their trust in a brand; in 2026 that nearly doubled to 39%.
• Disclosure is an expectation: more than 80% of consumers want AI-generated content labeled.
• Marketers feel the traffic hit: 50% reported organic traffic declines since AI Overviews launched, even as AI now touches 53% of marketing work (up from 38% in 2025).

Why 'get named by AI' is only half the job now

For a year the AI-visibility goal has been simple: get the engine to say your name. This data adds a second requirement — the name has to be right. When 39% of people say heavy AI use lowers their trust in a brand, a confident but wrong AI answer about your business isn't a neutral event; it's a trust cost you pay without ever seeing it. And AI answers are wrong more often than the polished tone suggests: in our run-to-run study, only 31% of recommended brands survived every repeat of the same question on the same engine — the shortlist reshuffles, names get attached to the wrong specialty, hours and locations drift. For local businesses — med spas, law firms, the trades — an AI that names you but garbles what you do can cost the booking as surely as one that omits you.

The traffic-decline number reinforces the strategic shift. If half of marketers are losing organic clicks to AI Overviews, the click you used to earn is increasingly replaced by a mention you don't control. You can't win that surface by publishing more — you win it by being the most accurate, quotable, and consistent version of your business across the sources these engines read.

The takeaway

Treat AI visibility as accuracy work, not just presence work. Start by finding out what the engines actually say about you today — not whether you're mentioned, but whether they get you right, and how often the answer changes. A free 60-second check samples ChatGPT and Perplexity (the $79 audit adds Gemini and Claude, 25 questions sampled three times each) and reports what they say about your business right now, so you can fix the wrong answers before they quietly cost you the trust this study says buyers are already withdrawing.