The Interactive Advertising Bureau on Sept. 9 published research finding that consumers who use A.I. assistants to shop want those assistants to cite creators, and report greater confidence in the recommendation when they do. The study, run through the trade group’s IAB Insights Engine, surveyed 2,200 shoppers across the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Mexico and India, each recently using an A.I. tool for shopping research.

The finding lands inside a larger repositioning of the ad market. IAB’s September update to its 2026 Outlook Study raised full-year U.S. ad-spend growth to 12.3 percent, up from the 9.5 percent projected in January. Among the more than 200 brand and agency decision-makers surveyed, 54 percent named creator and influencer advertising as the format receiving their most increased focus, ahead of demo-targeted advertising at 53 percent and publishers with first-party data at 48 percent.

Chris Bruderle, IAB’s vice president of industry insights and content strategy, framed the pivot bluntly: “Marketers have spent a lot of time asking, ‘How can I use A.I.?’ Now the question is becoming, ‘How do I reach a consumer who uses A.I.?’” Visibility, he said, is “becoming part of the media strategy in a much broader way,” including “the creator someone trusts” and “what an A.I. platform says when someone asks about your category.”

That’s the interesting move. Creator credibility is being reframed not as a social-media tactic but as an input to the recommendation layer sitting on top of commerce. Absence from creator conversations begins to function like absence from the answer itself, a dynamic already visible in reporting that A.I. referrals have begun outperforming other channels on revenue for small operators.

IAB is careful about how far the data travels. Its Aug. 3 framework, introducing the “4 P’s of A.I. Visibility” (presence, prominence, portrayal and persuasion) distinguishes directional data from decision-grade data. Caroline Giegerich, IAB’s vice president of A.I., warned that fewer than 50 queries against an A.I. system can’t “meaningfully characterize a category.” Only 16 percent of brands, per PPC Land’s account of the framework, systematically track their visibility inside A.I.-generated answers at all.

For smaller operators, the implication is structural rather than tactical. The discovery surface is consolidating around systems that read credibility signals from outside a brand’s owned channels, a pattern consistent with earlier findings that A.I. search rewards content quality over brand age. Being unmentioned by the creators an A.I. treats as credible isn’t neutral. It’s a negative signal, priced quietly, inside a channel most brands still don’t measure.

Sources