AI influence on consumer shopping and recommendation accuracy

New research highlights the growing influence and potential risks of AI in consumer decision-making. According to Contentsquare, 67% of consumers trust AI recommendations more than social media influencers when evaluating unfamiliar brands, and 47% report that AI has changed their purchasing decisions.

However, a disconnect between AI discovery and website experience can lead to significant losses. Contentsquare found that 97% of shoppers will reconsider a purchase if an AI recommendation leads to a disappointing website experience. Specifically, 57% will continue researching, 23% will switch brands, and 16% will abandon the purchase entirely.

In a separate development regarding AI reliability, an analysis of Perplexity AI models revealed issues with citation quality. Testing across 380 software categories showed that a large portion of cited domains were low-ranking or unranked. Specifically, 59.8% of citations pointed to domains ranked worse than #100,000 in the Tranco top 1M list, while 23.4% pointed to domains not included in the top million at all. The study also noted that three newly created sites, appearing since December 2023, have published over 215,000 machine-generated 'best software' pages.