Sitecore, a global digital experience software company that has served enterprise brands for more than 25 years, has published the Digital Authenticity Index, a consumer research study and interactive data tool designed to help marketers measure where digital brand experiences earn or lose trust. The research was conducted by Ipsos, a market research company that operates in 90 markets, between March 4 and March 19, 2026, among an online sample of 4,047 adults aged 18 and older across Australia, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The study measures consumer perceptions of digital authenticity across three dimensions. Credibility covers whether consumers believe a brand is accurate, honest and dependable. Relevance covers whether a digital experience feels useful and aligned to the consumer's needs. Responsibility covers whether consumers believe a brand is transparent and accountable. Across the nine signals the research tracks, consumers rated each 85 percent or above in importance. Accuracy and honesty ranked highest at 96 percent, yet consumers reported a 23-percentage-point gap between what they expect and what they believe brands currently deliver on that signal.
Eric Stine, CEO of Sitecore, described what AI is changing about the path consumers take before they reach a brand's owned digital properties:
"Digital has long been central to how brands build relationships with customers. What is changing with AI is how people find, evaluate, and experience brands. Consumers are showing up more informed and have often nearly decided on or at least more intensely considered a brand, effectively compressing the funnel. Authenticity is increasingly the deciding factor, and marketers have a tremendous opportunity to use state-of-the-art technology to deliver this authenticity, and with it whole new levels of conversion. The Digital Authenticity Index gives marketers a baseline for understanding how to improve authenticity - what consumers expect, where experiences are falling short, and where to focus improvement."
That funnel compression has a measurable dimension. Scrunch, a Sitecore company that tracks how AI platforms influence brand discovery, found that when an AI platform recommends a brand to a new consumer, that person becomes approximately 182 percent more likely to search for the brand, 117 percent more likely to visit its website and 185 percent more likely to view its products on a retailer page within the following week. A consumer arriving through that path has already taken multiple steps toward a purchase decision before the brand's digital experience begins.
Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, CMO of Sitecore, described what the Index is built to change about how marketing teams evaluate their work:
"Consumers do not experience a brand as a campaign, a channel, or a technology stack. They experience thousands of interactions that either reinforce trust or weaken it. The Index gives marketers a clearer way to look at those interactions and ask the practical questions: Are we accurate? Are we relevant? Are we transparent? Are we using AI in ways that make the experience better for the customer?"
The research identifies five practical areas for marketers. The Index is built to function as a baseline for comparing consumer expectations against brand delivery across its three core dimensions, with the intent that teams prioritize where expectations are highest and gaps are widest. Accuracy and honesty, the highest-rated signals in the study, carry direct implications for how teams review product information, customer service content and AI-generated answers. Personalization is framed as a trust variable rather than a performance variable: when it lands well it makes an experience feel more useful, and when it misses it makes the brand feel disconnected. On AI governance, the research finds that consumers respond differently to different AI use cases, with AI-generated or modified content viewed more skeptically than AI-enabled personalization that delivers relevant results. The fifth area treats visits that originate from AI platform recommendations as high-intent moments that require content, landing pages and follow-up experiences calibrated to the intent that drove the visit.
Alongside the research, Sitecore launched an interactive version of the Digital Authenticity Index on Sitecore.com that lets marketers filter findings by country, industry and generation. The study sample was drawn from Ipsos' online panel, partner panel sources and river sampling, with data weighted by age, gender, household income, region and ethnicity to reflect each country's adult population based on census data.
