State of Digital Trust 
2026
Consumers will now pay 7% more for the brands that have earned their trust on AI.
- 11,000 consumers.
- Seven markets.
- One commercial wake-up call.
Source
Source: Sapio Research × Usercentrics, March 2026. ±0.9% at 95% confidence.
Why trust became commercial in 2026
Learn what the 2026 data means for marketers and how the brands that move first can capture the premium.
Learn MoreSix chapters. One commercial story.
The trust economy
What consumers will pay for AI transparency, and what they’ll walk away from.
AI has changed the game
How consumer concern about AI became purchasing behavior and why 2026 marks a turning point from last year’s report.
The consent shift
“Accept all” is dying. What’s replacing it, and what that means for marketers.
The AI access frontier
Where consumers draw the line on agentic AI, and what brands need to build before they need it.
Where is trust in the world?
Country-by-country breakdown: Germany, United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Sweden.
From insight to action
A diagnostic, the T.R.U.S.T. framework, and a five-question self-assessment to find your starting point.
Where trust sits in the world
We are a diverse and growing team of industry experts in Technology.
The trust economy
For years, trust sat on the values slide: important, intangible, but rarely measured. Those days are over.
In 2026, trust shows up in churn rates, switching behavior, and willingness to pay more. And consumers are clear about what would make them pay a premium.
Three drivers come up unchanged since last year’s report
This year, AI has entered the picture: Over half (52%) of consumers globally will pay more for AI transparency, at an average 7% premium. The willingness runs deepest among 18–29 year-olds, where it jumps to 67%. The generation most willing to pay is the one brands most need to win long-term.
The AI premium – how much more people will pay by market
AI has changed the game
Consumers stopped describing how they feel about AI and started acting on it.
Almost half (47%) of consumers globally took at least one action with direct revenue consequence in the past six months such as canceling, switching, or reducing spend, driven by concerns about how brands handle their data in AI. The actions are concrete and commercial.
Personalization isn’t the problem. Unexplained personalization is.
71% of consumers find AI-driven personalization intrusive. Read in isolation, that sounds like a mandate to pull back.
But among privacy-aware consumers — the ones reading cookie banners, who understand their data rights — 53% are comfortable with personalization. Among privacy-unaware consumers, that figure drops to 19%.
x3
The consent shift
Mindless “accept all” is dying. What’s replacing it changes how marketing works.
That two-to-one ratio is a structural behavioral shift across every market in the study. The campaign signals brands have built their measurement infrastructure around are degrading at the source.
Users worn down by years of cookie banners, clicking through to reach the content.
A privacy awakening
Consumers reading the “more information” link more often, understanding what’s being done with their data, and choosing deliberately.
31 points
That’s the gap in “accept all” rates between privacy-aware and privacy-unaware consumers. As awareness spreads, that gap will narrow — and the consent rate brands are banking on today is not the consent rate they’ll have tomorrow.
That figure has not changed in two years.
The systems built to explain data use to consumers — banners, policies, notices — aren’t doing the job they were designed to do. According to NordVPN, a typical internet user would need a full working week each month to read the privacy policies of every site they visit.
This failure isn’t on the user. It’s a design failure — and it compounds every year it goes unfixed.
The AI access frontier
Today, brands ask consumers for consent. Tomorrow, AI agents will need access.
Agentic AI goes far beyond just responding, it acts on the user’s behalf. It books meetings, reviews contracts, monitors accounts, and makes decisions inside tools and services consumers already use. That shift changes the nature of trust entirely. The infrastructure connecting AI assistants to third-party apps is being built and adopted right now.
For brands and developers, the question is the same: are you building the trust infrastructure ahead of the access, or after the fact?
The consumer data gives a precise picture of where this needs to go next.
Where is trust in the world?
Trust isn’t uniform. Seven markets, seven different commercial stories.
Consumer attitudes to data privacy, AI, and brand accountability vary significantly across the seven markets we surveyed, and so does the commercial opportunity. Local context isn’t a footnote. It’s the whole brief.
From insight to action
Where to start: three tiers, five steps.
The data tells you where consumer trust is breaking down, this part tells you what to do about it. Start with the diagnostic and it will tell you which step of the T.R.U.S.T. framework is most relevant to you today.
The readiness diagnostic
The T.R.U.S.T. Framework
Five steps, in the order that works. Each builds on the one before. Most organizations get stuck by jumping ahead or by treating these as parallel workstreams when the sequence is the point.
Translate — get the consent moment right
Start at the banner. Clear, considered, written for the person reading it — not the legal team that approved it. Until the consent moment itself works, nothing further in this framework will.
Remove — strip out what's undermining the choice
Give equal weight to accept, decline, and customize. Make controls reachable in two clicks. Dark patterns produce opt-ins, not consent.
Unify — extend the standard everywhere consent matters
The banner, preference center, DSAR tool, and AI disclosure all need to feel like the same brand making the same promise. Inconsistency signals privacy as an afterthought.
Secure — extend governance into AI and third-party data flows
Map where consent signals go. Ensure AI tools don’t become shadow data processors. Governance must be in place before deployment, not retrofitted.
Track — measure trust as a commercial signal
Opt-in rate alone tells you nothing. The numbers that matter are retention, churn, complaints, DSAR volume. Clean consented data is a performance input.
Where do you stand?
Find out where your consent strategy actually stands.
About the research
State of Digital Trust 2026 is the second annual study commissioned by Usercentrics and conducted by Sapio Research. 11,000 consumers across seven markets. Fieldwork conducted in March 2026. Accurate to ±0.9% at 95% confidence. Sweden joins the study for the first time this year; year-on-year comparisons exclude Sweden.