By Anna Jankowska, Executive Vice President of Global Partnerships, RTB House
Google’s decision in late 2025 to introduce advertising into its AI Overviews marks a significant shift in how people discover information. Now, for billions of Google users, queries will no longer simply generate a list of links to peruse and explore. Instead, the results will be led by a single AI-generated summary, complemented by paid placements.
While this may create some efficiency for users, it also poses a significant new challenge for marketers. How can brands ensure that messaging is seen, believed, and remembered when users’ needs are increasingly being met by AI-generated content?
The risk is not simply that messages get lost; it’s that they get drowned out by a flood of content that looks convincing and sounds confident, but may ultimately be unreliable. An authoritative tone of voice is easy for AI to simulate, after all.
Trust has always been an important factor in brand marketing. Today, however, it has become the foundation for sustainable growth.
When everything sounds credible, what is real?
The boom in AI-generated content has created an information overload for the general public. Consumers, exposed to more information than ever, have fewer cues to distinguish what’s authentic from what’s automated, resulting in confusion, scepticism, and eventually disengagement.
People only stop scrolling when something feels sincere, relevant and emotionally resonant. Content that reflects a genuine understanding of lived experience resonates with audiences in ways that generic messaging cannot, no matter how polished. At the heart of that response is trust.
For marketers, this changes the role and nature of ‘performance’. It’s no longer enough to capture demand in the final moment before conversion. Instead, marketers should build awareness and credibility well before that moment arrives, so that when a short window of opportunity opens, the brand is already positioned as a reliable, trusted choice.
At that point, trust becomes measurable. Brands that invest in building trust over time will be rewarded with higher engagement, stronger loyalty and greater lifetime value. What’s more, in the event of mistakes or slip-ups, trusted brands are far more likely to be forgiven by consumers.
Trust as a competitive advantage
Trust itself has become a competitive advantage.
When the stakes are high and decisions carry risk, most people aren’t looking for cold professionalism driven solely by logic. They look for transparency, small gestures that signal care, and genuine, person-to-person connections, reassuring customers that accountability underpins the message. They need someone they know by name to stand behind the promise.
This doesn’t mean there is no role for AI in building trust relationships with clients. On the contrary, AI can enhance marketing teams by improving efficiency, personalisation and scale. Technology can easily handle optimisation and analysis, freeing people to focus on empathy, creativity and relationship-building – the human skills and qualities that machines struggle to replicate.
Used appropriately, AI can help to build trust. Used carelessly, AI can help to destroy it. While it’s tempting to see trust as intangible, something that sits outside traditional performance metrics, in reality, it’s still one of the strongest drivers of ROI.
The human signal in an automated world
Trust is the crucial factor in determining whether a customer converts, how often they return, how much they spend over time, and whether they’ll recommend a brand to others. Building trust requires consistency across all touchpoints. Every ad impression and every customer service response adds to or subtracts from the trust a customer feels in your brand, so all marketing should be designed with that in mind. In an AI-heavy environment, this consistency becomes even more important.
Regardless of size, every business now faces a similar challenge: building brand trust at scale. AI may have lowered the barrier to entry for content creation, but it hasn’t lowered consumers’ expectations. Indeed, people are more alert than ever to tone, transparency and intent. Brands that are honest and authentic win, while the others may fall by the wayside.
Trust can’t be generated on demand. It can only be earned the hard way, interaction by interaction, through clarity, consistency and genuine respect for the customer. As AI reshapes how information is discovered and decisions are made, trust is what turns attention into action, and action into loyalty.
From AI to ROI, the path is clear. Brands that focus on trust today will be in a strong position, regardless of how technology evolves.
