43% of Americans say they don’t trust much of anything online anymore. Nearly half!
In this episode of SaaS Half Full, Lindsey Groepper sat down with Jake Doll, VP of Client Relations at PANBlast, to unpack the results of a 1,000-person consumer survey on AI credibility fatigue and what it means for B2B SaaS marketers trying to cut through in a zero-click world.
AI Credibility Fatigue: People are exhausted.
There’s a difference between distrust and apathy, and we’ve crossed into apathy territory. Consumers know AI-generated content is everywhere. They know it’s often wrong. But verifying everything is exhausting, so they’ve stopped trying.
Instead, they’ve developed workarounds Jake calls “trust shortcuts” — mental heuristics that let them move fast without doing the research. Familiar brand name? Good enough. Lots of G2 reviews? Fine. High up in organic search? Probably legit. Third-party media coverage? That works too.
The wildest shortcut of all: 20% of respondents use one AI tool to verify the accuracy of another. Jake describes this as an Ouroboros (a snake eating its own tail) where AI-generated content feeds AI-generated content in an infinite loop of degrading quality.
“22% of respondents use one AI tool to verify the accuracy of another. That’s a lot of red flags. Both sources could be inaccurate.”
— Jake Doll
Brand familiarity is a “Trust Shortcut” to credibility.
The number one trust shortcut consumers rely on is simple: they trust brands they’ve heard of. This creates an obvious problem for emerging B2B SaaS and AI-native companies that don’t have years of brand equity to lean on.
Jake’s advice for building visibility fast:
Make a noise with announcements. A new hire, a product launch, a funding round, use PR Newswire or a trade pub like Marketing Dive to get something published outside your own domain.
Clean up your LinkedIn presence. No headshot, no banner, an empty About section are all signals that a person or company isn’t real. For prospects doing a quick trust check, your LinkedIn profile is often the first stop.
Get on Reddit, carefully. Reddit is a top source for LLMs, and Jke belives that moderation is exactly why. Real people asking real questions, real people vetting the answers. Jake started adding genuine commentary to relevant threads in the public relations subreddit (no brand pitching, just actual perspective) and PANBlast posts began surfacing in LLM results shortly after.
Showing up in AI search is about strategy.
More than a third of consumers take AI overviews at face value. That means getting cited accurately in those results is now a legitimate marketing objective, not just an SEO nice-to-have.
Jake recommends auditing where your brand actually shows up when specific prompts are run. Is your website using the language you want AI to associate with you? Are your executives posting relevant content on LinkedIn? Do your blogs explain how you’re different from competitors in plain language that the model can index?
LinkedIn individual posts and Reddit threads are consistently appearing as top sources feeding LLM responses. If your team isn’t active in either, you’re ceding that ground to someone else.
Are we making the trust problem better or worse?
Jake closed with something worth sitting with. The 43% stat, “I don’t trust much of anything anymore,” isn’t purely an AI problem. Fake news, misinformation, platform manipulation: that erosion has been building for years. AI just accelerated it.
For marketers, that reframes the question. It’s not just “how do we show up in search?” It’s “are we making the trust problem better or worse?” Cranking out AI-generated content at volume to hit a publishing cadence is easy. It’s also part of the problem.
The brands that win in this environment will be the ones that give people something actually worth trusting.
After listening, check out the full survey findings and ebook: “Trust Issues: How SaaS and AI-Native Brands Can Beat AI Credibility Fatigue.”
Check out all SaaS Half Full episodes
Transcript
This has been generated by AI and optimized by a human.
VIDEO INTRO
[00:00:00] Jake Doll: 20% of respondents will use an AI tool themselves as a trust shortcut. The existential crisis that can spin me around is unfortunate. The other one that is a really agreed-upon statement: 43% of people say, I don’t trust much of anything anymore.
[00:00:21] Lindsey Groepper: Hi, and welcome back to SaaS Half Full — the only show serving B2B SaaS marketers.
[00:00:26] Lindsey Groepper: I’m Lindsey Groepper, EVP at PANBlast, and I’ll be both your host and bartender. Today I had the opportunity to talk with one of my all-time favorite people, our very own Jake Doll, Vice President of Client Relations at PANBlast. Jake ideated a survey that recently went out — we’ll send you all the links in the show notes — about this idea of AI credibility fatigue. How Americans are feeling completely burnt out when it comes to verifying whether information online is real. I know you’ve all felt it. I certainly have. We’re going to unpack the results of this survey and what it means for B2B SaaS marketers, and this idea that people are now using trust shortcuts rather than doing deep research to verify things online.
[00:01:13] Lindsey Groepper: So grab a drink and join me and Jake as we talk about AI credibility fatigue. Hey Jake, welcome back to SaaS Half Full.
[00:01:21] Jake Doll: Thanks, Lindsey. I’m so glad you invited me back.
[00:01:24] Lindsey Groepper: Last time you were on, it was a while ago — it was about what’s wired and what’s tired in AI. I should have gone back and listened before this recording to see how accurate your predictions were, but I didn’t, so you’re safe for now.
[00:01:39] Jake Doll: I think we can just assume it was accurate and move forward.
[00:01:43] Lindsey Groepper: We’ll do that. This is one of the only SaaS Half Full recordings I’ve done first thing on a Monday morning. You just came back from Florida, it was 70 degrees here in Indianapolis, and now we’ve had a 50-degree drop and it’s freaking snowing. Honestly, this is driving me to drink — I’m having a screwdriver. Classic morning cocktail. Are you joining me?
[00:02:08] Jake Doll: I am. I’ve got an Irish coffee because tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day — celebrating with a Jameson cold brew shot in my hot coffee because, as you said, it’s snowing and I need to warm up.
[00:02:24] Lindsey Groepper: Cheers. I think St. Patty’s Day and this awful weather are perfect reasons to be drinking at 10 AM on a Monday.
[00:02:32] Jake Doll: Cheers. Good morning.
[00:02:35] Lindsey Groepper: About once a year — sometimes twice — we have someone on from PANBlast. For those listening who may not know who PANBlast is: it’s the agency where I’m EVP. We execute PR for emerging SaaS and AI companies. We recently ran a survey, and Jake, this was ideated by you and your team that helps market us as an agency. It’s centered on a new term called AI credibility fatigue — how consumers are taking what we’re calling trust shortcuts because they’re flat-out tired of asking, “Is this information real?” We’ll dive into all of that, but first I want to give our listeners a refresher on who Jake Doll is. Talk to us about your history with the agency, your role, and then we’ll get into the survey.
[00:03:35] Jake Doll: So you called out an important point — I was just in Orlando. I like to joke that I’m a DK: Disney, No Kids. I saw that acronym online and thought it was hilarious. I was there for the Reagan Social Media and PR Conference, which was great, but I can’t be on property in Orlando without stepping into Disney. Had a ton of fun. At PANBlast, I’m VP of Client Relations, which means I’m focused on the success of PR programs. A lot of clients come to us for media relations as a starting point, and then we figure out where they are on the PR maturity curve and what the next best step looks like — more content, social, awards, research. And increasingly, those conversations are about how we and our clients are using AI, what’s working, what’s innovative, and what’s creating friction with their prospects or the general public.
[00:04:46] Lindsey Groepper: We’re having a lot of those conversations with clients about how to show up in this zero-click world with LLM visibility. What I think is fascinating about our job as PR professionals right now is this renaissance around authentic storytelling and the importance of narrative. And honestly — no surprise there. We’ve been saying this since the beginning of our careers. But the way LLMs are structured now, they’re pulling heavily from third-party sources, which often means PR sources, LinkedIn, and so on. PR is front and center in the AI search visibility landscape.
[00:05:35] Lindsey Groepper: What I thought was really cool about your approach, Jake, was that rather than producing more content about what B2B marketers should be doing from a MarTech or channel optimization standpoint, you took a different angle — how do people actually feel? Strip out the B2B, B2C, D2C lens and just ask: how are real human beings navigating online information every day? Talk to us about where that idea came from and why you went the original research route with a general consumer audience rather than B2B marketers.
[00:06:20] Jake Doll: You used a pretty gross word right off the bat at 10 AM — “regurgitate.” One image that really stuck with me, and I shared it with you over Slack, is the Ouroboros: the historical symbol of a snake eating its own tail. You’ve probably seen it in a Viking show or movie. The concept is infinity, but what struck me is how well it maps to how we’re using AI today. The snake keeps eating the same part of itself — AI-generated content is creating more AI-generated content, and the quality degrades over time. That image made me ask: am I crazy for questioning the validity and accuracy of what’s being produced? It wasn’t a hard sell, because anyone I talked to immediately understood the feeling of wondering whether what they’re reading online is actually true.
[00:07:59] Lindsey Groepper: It resonated with me completely. I’m not too proud to admit I’ve become apathetic. It’s different if I’m taking information and then repurposing it as fact. But I’m definitely one of those people the survey uncovered — I often trust an AI overview at face value for a quick reference check and move on. It’s just exhausting to figure out where else to look when something doesn’t feel right.
[00:08:46] Jake Doll: Right. If we weren’t on a podcast and were having mimosas at brunch — if you referenced something about the Oscars and I wanted to verify it, I’d quickly Google it and take that result at face value. There are questions people just want an immediate answer to, and they’re not going to verify further. But I remember seeing AI overviews years ago that would say things like — can you give a baby Mountain Dew? And the answer was yes. Which is absolutely wrong. So the quick answer works for some things, but when you really want to educate yourself on a technical topic, you have to find an additional trust shortcut.
[00:09:47] Lindsey Groepper: So the survey covered a thousand consumers — not B2B marketing leaders, just a general US audience asking how they feel about all of this. And one of the key things that came through is this idea of AI credibility fatigue. Unpack that term for us.
[00:10:10] Jake Doll: At PANBlast, we do market research for clients through a great partner called DTA that helps us reach both specific ICP audiences and general population samples. For something we were trying to quantify as a feeling, it made sense to go broad — multi-generational, different work and life experiences, a real cross-section of how everyday people navigate this complex, often inaccurate environment. We could have run this just for B2B marketers, but we wanted the high-level view: 1,000 standard US adults.
[00:11:19] Jake Doll: The concept of credibility fatigue existed before we got there — there were articles about it. But AI-specific credibility fatigue? That’s the feeling when you look at an AI overview and think, “I don’t think this is true” — and then what? Do you just flag it as uncertain and pass it along? Or do you take a trust shortcut, like going to Wikipedia because you trust them more? That exhaustion — seeing something, doubting it, and then having to figure out how to verify — that’s the fatigue. And Wikipedia is absolutely a trust shortcut people use.
[00:12:17] Lindsey Groepper: What I found interesting — almost a juxtaposition — is that despite the fact that something like two-thirds of Americans say they’re tired of having to verify everything online, and despite a growing sense of mistrust, they’ve become so fatigued that they’ve turned apathetic. Instead of verifying, they’ve identified certain sources they’ll just trust. Your Wikipedia example is one. Brand familiarity is another — “I don’t know if this is accurate, but it’s from a brand I’ve heard of, so I’ll take it.” Or: “This company has a lot of reviews. Good enough.” They know the information probably isn’t trustworthy, but they’re defaulting to these shortcuts. So what did the survey uncover about which sources people are turning to most?
[00:13:41] Jake Doll: One of the most surprising stats for me was that people will actually use AI itself as a trust verification shortcut — which brings us right back to the Ouroboros. An AI overview via Google may or may not be accurate, and then a subset of people, about 20%, will go verify it in ChatGPT. Both could be wrong. That’s a lot of red flags, and it’s something we need to figure out as a society.
[00:14:26] Jake Doll: When I look at the legitimate trust shortcuts people turn to outside of AI: brand recognition is huge. If a prospect Googles PANBlast to see if we do consumer PR, and the AI gives them something vague, they’ll go directly to our website, look at our services, and verify from the source — because the assumption is that the brand will be more accurate than what AI might generate. Reviews are another big one. We have a G2 page, and we talk about that with clients, because third-party validation is exactly what people are looking for. Organic search rankings also carry weight — being high on the results page reads as a signal of accuracy. And of course, media coverage: a story vetted by an editor and published on a reputable outlet is another trust shortcut people lean on.
[00:16:23] Lindsey Groepper: The research showed that brand familiarity was the number one trust shortcut — people trust information from brands they’ve heard of. But if you’re an early-stage company, whether that’s an emerging B2B SaaS or a new AI-native brand, you don’t have that historical credibility or brand authority. What are some of the fastest ways those companies can build brand familiarity right now?
[00:16:54] Jake Doll: I referenced the PR maturity curve earlier — we’ve got a blog that walks through every step a company can take to build and expand their PR program. But if you Google a company and nothing comes up, there are a few quick wins. First: announcements. Not every PR program is announcement-heavy, and that’s fine. But if you’re launching a company, a product, or a key hire, use something like PR Newswire or a trade publication — Marketing Dive is where we published our research. Getting a piece published outside your own website enhances visibility and helps you show up in search results. Then share it on LinkedIn.
[00:18:02] Jake Doll: The number of LinkedIn profiles I see with no headshot, no banner, a blank or outdated About section — that’s a signal to prospects that the company might not be real. News plus a built-out LinkedIn presence are two of the fastest places to start.
[00:18:34] Lindsey Groepper: What about other formats? Earned media is hard to get but worth pursuing — it gets indexed by LLMs. What about Substack, Reddit, Medium, YouTube?
[00:18:57] Jake Doll: YouTube is huge, specifically for edutainment — education plus entertainment. We talk about short-form video as a great attention grab, but long-form video is the other side of the pendulum. When someone wants to learn a technical subject, they go to YouTube for the 30-minute deep dive. Think about how-to content — if you’re a B2B SaaS or AI-native company, you have that knowledge and you should be putting it there.
[00:20:03] Jake Doll: Substack is also significant. Newsrooms are shrinking. Writers, editors, and reporters are going independent on Substack, Beehive, and Medium. Because they’re often a one-person operation, they’re responsive. Engage with their work, tell them you appreciated a piece, introduce yourself, share your perspective — that’s a great way to build visibility and relationships within your audience’s ecosystem.
[00:20:57] Lindsey Groepper: One stat that stood out: more than a third of people take AI overviews at face value as factual — and that wasn’t segmented by personal versus work use, just in general. What does that mean for how brands need to show up in AI-generated search results?
[00:21:44] Jake Doll: It’s worth talking about LLM visibility specifically. At PANBlast, we use a tool to track where we’re showing up across about 25 prompts related to our services — how frequently, and whether the sentiment is positive compared to our competitive set. This is available to B2B SaaS brands, consumer brands, really any company that wants to understand what’s being said when their name is associated with a query.
[00:22:32] Jake Doll: If we’re not showing up in the prompts we care about, we have to ask: does our website use the right language? Are our spokespeople using that language on LinkedIn? Do we have blogs explaining how our services differ from competitors? AI is seeking out information that exists publicly and in specific channels. We can look at the top sources feeding context to the AI and ask — are we there? If not, that’s where the work starts.
[00:23:45] Lindsey Groepper: A real example of that: when we audited our top sources for specific prompts, LinkedIn kept coming up — not just influencers, but regular people leading teams and businesses with contextually relevant posts. We weren’t surfacing there, so we built a strategy around it, and sure enough, posts from PANBlast individuals started appearing as top sources for unbranded prompts.
[00:24:27] Lindsey Groepper: The other example is what you did on Reddit, Jake. Reddit shows up as a top source for LLMs across virtually every category. We weren’t surfacing there at all. So Jake made a concentrated effort to add genuine commentary to relevant threads — not planting a PANBlast flag, just contributing real perspective. And very quickly, that post started surfacing in LLM results. Small changes, real impact. Even if you’re an emerging company without a big budget, you can start chipping away at how you show up in LLMs.
[00:25:43] Jake Doll: Reddit is a huge opportunity, and it has strict guidelines — cross them too many times and you’re out. What makes Reddit such a strong LLM visibility source is that it’s real people asking real questions in communities moderated by real people. That moderation is what sets it apart. They’re watching for spam, AI-generated content, and bots. Astroturfing — where a brand goes in pretending not to be a brand and posting what reads like an ad — is exactly what gets you removed. My approach was to provide genuine value: share my own take, answer questions honestly. Occasionally I’d mention that I’m Jake from PANBlast for context, but that was never the lead. The value was.
[00:27:20] Lindsey Groepper: What else from the survey — specific stats or broader narratives — do you find most interesting that we haven’t covered?
[00:27:34] Jake Doll: The 20% using AI to verify AI is one. But equally striking is this: 43% of people say they don’t trust much of anything anymore. That’s not purely an AI problem — the rise of fake news and misinformation has been building for years. But layering that on top of abundant, often low-quality AI-generated content creates a whole new level of credibility fatigue.
[00:28:31] Jake Doll: As PR professionals at PANBlast, I think we all have to ask ourselves: is what we’re doing contributing to that fatigue, or are we actually providing a legitimate trust shortcut — making information more accurate and clearer for anyone reading or listening? It’s easy to open ChatGPT and say, “I need a blog post, I need a press release, get it out the door.” But that’s not helpful to you or, frankly, to society. Finding ways to bring that 43% number down feels genuinely important — and honestly, revitalizing for our industry.
[00:29:42] Lindsey Groepper: I completely agree. Where can people find the full survey results, and where can they find you?
[00:29:49] Jake Doll: We have a press release with our initial findings on the website, plus a full ebook — about eight pages of information and takeaways. Find both at PANBlastPR.com under Insights and Resources. And I’m on LinkedIn at Jake Doll, where I frequently share thoughts on how AI is changing our day-to-day and our industry. Would love to connect, have an existential crisis together, or figure out some solutions.
[00:30:38] Lindsey Groepper: I love it — and for the record, I don’t think they’re ramblings at all. I’m going to finish my drink, because I am looking out my window at a complete whiteout right now.
[00:30:55] Lindsey Groepper: So I’ll wrap it here. Jake, I ask every guest the same question at the end: do you have a signature toast?
[00:31:05] Jake Doll: Ever since college, whenever I’d raise a glass, I’d say: “To new beginnings” — even if we were just headed home. It feels right for today, talking about AI. Cheers to new beginnings.
[00:31:20] Lindsey Groepper: To new beginnings. Thanks again to Jake for joining me on SaaS Half Full — always a great conversation. If you want to see the full survey results, check the show notes. Hope you’re walking away with a few things to adjust in your marketing strategy. We always appreciate the listen — and until next time, bottoms up.