Should You Actually Care About AI Search? The Headlines Say No, But The Facts Say Something Different.
63% of Americans distrust AI.
49% use it anyway.
Whether that matters to your business depends entirely on who your customers actually are.
A Morning Consult report dropped last week, and it's been making the rounds in marketing circles with a pretty confident headline attached to it: AI is one of the most distrusted categories in America. The implication being sold to CMOs is obvious. Don't invest in AI search visibility. The trust isn't there.
Here's the issue. That headline is technically true and strategically useless.
The people sharing it aren't lying. The report does say that. But it also says about a dozen other things that completely change what that finding means for your business. And most people aren't reading past the first bullet.
If you've been sitting in meetings where someone used this report to argue against investing in AEO, this article is for you. Not to convince you to go all-in on something unproven, but to make sure the decision you're making is based on the actual data, not a third of it.
What the Report Actually Says
The Morning Consult AI Trust Report, published May 10, 2026, is a legitimate piece of research. Nationally representative survey of 1,048 U.S. adults. Continuous brand tracking across 3,000+ brands in 40+ countries. Daily data collection. This is not a LinkedIn poll.
And yes, the headline number is stark:
63% of Americans now trust AI only a little or not at all
The share who say they "do not trust AI at all" jumped 9 points to 36% since August 2025
AI ranks 10th out of 198 tracked categories in awareness-adjusted distrust
The categories it sits alongside: tobacco, chemicals, dating apps, crypto
That's not a number you brush off. It's real, and it matters.
But here's what happens when you stop reading there.
Trust is three different things, and they point in three different directions
The report tracks trust across distinct contexts: brand trust, industry trust, and utility trust. Each one tells a completely different story, and most people sharing this report are only telling one of them.
Brand trust is low.
When people are asked how much they trust AI companies, the numbers are bad and getting worse. Seven of the ten leading AI brands lost net trust year-over-year:
xAI fell furthest, down 5.5 points
Perplexity dropped 5.4 points
Meta AI lost 5 points
OpenAI fell 2.2 points
Only Gemini (+6), Anthropic (+1.4), and Apple Intelligence (+1.2) gained ground
Only 12% of Americans say AI leaders are generally credible and trustworthy. The faces of AI, Musk, Altman, Zuckerberg, are not helping.
But notice what the report also says: the people who distrust OpenAI use ChatGPT. The people who distrust Google use Gemini. Brand trust and product trust are not the same measurement, and the data makes that split explicit.
Industry trust is complicated.
In general, people don't trust the AI industry. But the reasons matter. The top negative associations are:
Spreading misinformation or fake content: 39%
Threatening people's jobs: 38%
Collecting and misusing personal data: 33%
Training AI on people's data without consent: 32%
These are concerns about AI's cultural impact, not about whether it helps someone draft an email or summarize a report. People are combining what AI companies do to society with what AI tools do for them personally. Those are different questions, and conflating them produces a number that's true and misleading at the same time.
Utility trust is high.
When you separate out personal use, the story flips completely.
Self-reported chatbot use jumped from 31% in May 2024 to 49% in April 2026. Nearly half of Americans are now using AI chatbots with some regularity. And when asked about specific domains, expected impact turns positive:
Healthcare: +14
Daily life: +7
Education: +5
The clearest data point on all of this: Americans register net positive trust for exactly three entities when it comes to using AI responsibly. Themselves (+16). Their family (+7). Their friends (+5). Everyone else is negative, including AI companies (-14), large tech (-18), and the federal government (-28).
People don't trust AI companies. They trust themselves to use it just fine. That distinction is doing a lot of work that most articles are ignoring.
What This Means for Your Strategy
None of this is an argument that AI trust concerns are overblown. They aren't. But the right question isn't "is trust in AI high or low?" It's "does the trust picture match my customers, my category, and my market?" That answer varies dramatically depending on where you look.
Your customers are not the general population
The demographic splits in this report are some of the most dramatic findings in it, and they're almost never cited.
Trust is highest among:
High-income earners ($100k+): net trust of +23.7
Urban residents: +17.9
College graduates: +17.9
Millennials: +17.7
Men: +15.6
Trust is lowest among:
Gen Z: +4.1
Independents: +5.9
Rural residents: +6.8
Adults without a college degree: +8.3
Women: +8.7
That's a 33-point gap between high-income earners and adults under $50k. A 13.6-point gap between Millennials and Gen Z. These are not slight demographic tilts. These are fundamentally different relationships with AI.
If you're a B2B company selling to finance, tech, or professional services, your buyers are not the general population. The low trust headline applies to them far less than it applies to the aggregate number. If your buyers skew rural, older, or lower-income, the concern is more directly relevant.
Map your customer base against these splits before making any AI search investment decision. It's a 30-minute exercise with data you already have.
The distrust story has a very specific address
This is the finding that almost nobody is quoting, and it changes the picture entirely.
The low trust story is almost entirely a U.S. and Anglosphere phenomenon. ChatGPT's average net trust across the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia is 9.7. The average across every other country tracked is roughly 40 points higher.
Continental averages for ChatGPT net trust:
Africa: +61.8
South America: +51.1
Asia: +50
North America: +22.9
Europe: +20.3
Australia: +6.7
Individual country data tells the same story. Nigeria sits at 80.4. India at 72.5. Brazil at 55.5. The U.S. ranks 21st out of 28 countries tracked.
And the directional data makes this more striking. Trust in both ChatGPT and Gemini rose year-over-year in nearly every market. Gemini posted double-digit gains in Vietnam (+31.2), Brazil (+29.3), South Korea (+26.2), and India (+22.3). ChatGPT's net trust declined in only three markets: the U.S. (-1.4), Canada (-3.1), and Australia (-6.5).
The trust headwind is real. It just has a very specific address.
If your business has any international component, or serves industries with global audiences, the distrust story may genuinely not describe your customer base.
Most opinions are still forming
This is the part of the report that almost nobody is talking about, and it may be the most strategically significant.
For most AI brands, around three-quarters of Americans don't have a firm opinion yet. The report notes it directly: about 75% of Americans aren't familiar with or don't have an opinion on brands like Anthropic or xAI. Even more prominent brands like OpenAI and Gemini have only just crossed the threshold where half of Americans register any opinion at all
These are not hardened opinions. They are forming opinions.
A low trust number among people still making up their minds is a very different signal than low trust among people who have decided. The former is an opportunity. The latter is a wall.
The people using AI chatbots daily, now 49% of American adults, are the ones most likely to rely on AI for research, recommendations, and decisions. If you're not visible when they ask, someone else is. And the first answer often becomes the default answer.
Usage and trust are moving in opposite directions
This may be the most counterintuitive finding in the report, and it directly challenges the "don't invest in AI search" argument.
Trust peaked in October 2025 at a net score near 12. It has since softened to 8.5. In that same window, chatbot usage went from 31% to 49%.
Trust went down. Usage went up.
People are using AI more even as they trust the industry less. The report attributes the trust softening to late-2025 headlines: AI-attributed layoffs, mental health and privacy incidents involving chatbots, the expanding reach of deepfakes. These are cultural concerns about AI's societal effects. They are not changing individual usage behavior.
The implication is direct. The decision your customers make about whether to use AI to research a purchase has very little to do with how much they trust AI companies as institutions. People who say they distrust AI companies are still using ChatGPT to research products, compare providers, and find services.
If AI search is one of the ways your customers now research, their opinion about the industry has no bearing on whether you show up in those results.
See how AI search fits into your strategy. Check your visibility in three minutes: tools.camino5.com.
The Balanced Picture
The report isn't rosy. There are findings here that every marketer should take seriously.
Privacy concerns are the lowest-rated expected impact area in the entire survey, at -24 net. Democracy and elections sit at -16. These aren't fringe anxieties. They're majority-held concerns with real regulatory implications. The report flags explicitly that a future Democratic-led Congress or White House would inherit a constituency that has grown markedly more AI-skeptical, sharpening the political case for content-moderation, copyright, and antitrust action against the industry. That's a real forward risk.
The generational picture is also worth sitting with. Gen Z's trust is 4.1. These are the people who will be buying your products for the next 40 years. If their trust continues to erode while usage continues to climb among older cohorts, the long-term market dynamics look different from the next-two-years dynamics.
And the negative associations carry weight. Misinformation (39%), job displacement (38%), and data privacy (33%) are not niche concerns. They are widespread, and they shape how people engage with AI-generated content, including AI-generated answers about your business.
The point isn't that the trust story doesn't matter. The point is that whether it matters to your specific business, in your specific category, for your specific customer, requires more than a single headline number pulled from a 22-page report.
The Takeaways
Takeaway 1:
The distrust data describes a general population average. Your customers are not the general population average. The answer to "does AI search matter for my business" lives in your customer demographics and category data, not in a headline.
Takeaway 2:
Usage and trust are diverging. People are using AI more while trusting AI companies less. Your customers may be making purchase decisions through AI-assisted research regardless of how they feel about the industry. Visibility is a separate question from sentiment.
Takeaway 3:
Most Americans still don't have hardened opinions about AI brands. Companies that earn early visibility in AI-generated responses will have a structural advantage as those opinions form. Being part of the answer matters most while the answer is still being decided.
The Actions
Action 1: Map your customer base against the demographic trust splits
Pull your customer data and map it against the key variables from this report: age, income, geography, and industry. If your buyers are Millennials, urban professionals, or high-income earners, the distrust headline applies to them significantly less than the average. If they skew rural, older, or lower-income, the concern is more directly relevant. This takes 30 minutes with data you already have, and it will tell you more than the aggregate number ever could.
Action 2: Check your current AI search visibility before deciding anything
Before investing in AEO strategy or dismissing it, know where you stand. Run your brand and your top three competitors through a handful of real-customer prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overview. See who shows up. If your competitors are visible and you aren't, you're already behind regardless of your position on AI trust as a concept. You can also run a quick check at https://tools.camino5.com/ to get a baseline in three minutes.
Action 3: Separate "should we invest in AEO" from "are our customers using AI to research us"
These are different questions with different answers. Pull your Google Search Console data and check whether queries that used to drive traffic are declining even while your rankings stay the same. If they are, AI-absorbed traffic is a likely explanation. The investment question follows the customer behavior question, not the sentiment question.
Action 4: Look at category-specific impact data, not just the overall number
Healthcare (+14), daily life (+7), and education (+5) all show net-positive expected AI impact in this report. Privacy (-24) and democracy (-16) show the opposite. If your business operates in a category where personal utility is direct and visible, the aggregate distrust number is telling you almost nothing useful about your buyers specifically.
Action 5: Don't make a permanent strategy decision on a number that's still moving
Trust peaked at 12 in October 2025 and is now at 8.5. Usage went from 31% to 49% in two years. Japan had almost no AI adoption two years ago; today AI companies are four of the six fastest-growing brands in Japan by usage, with ChatGPT and Gemini each gaining 15.5 points in users year-over-year. Markets that looked skeptical turned fast. Position for where the trend is going, not just where today's number sits.
Want to see where you stand in AI search right now? Check your visibility in three minutes at tools.camino5.com