Canadian Study Says Trust Is the New Currency for Brands in an AI-Driven World

With insights from Ali de Bold

A new report from Ontario-based Butterly offers some of the clearest Canadian data yet on what actually makes consumer feedback useful, and the findings have real implications for how brands think about discovery, reviews, and advocacy in 2026.

The Butterly 2026 Trust Index, based on responses from approximately 2,100 Canadian consumers who tested real products in their everyday lives, lands on a straightforward but important conclusion: the quality of consumer insight has less to do with volume and more to do with conditions. Specifically, trust.

"People are honest when they feel respected, when there is no pressure to be positive, when the product is a good fit for their life, and when they believe someone is actually paying attention to what they say," says Ali de Bold, Founder and CEO of Butterly.

The numbers back that up. Ninety-nine percent of participants said they felt comfortable being completely honest in their reviews, even when their experience was negative. Ninety-five percent felt confident that brands actually listen to and act on their feedback. Those aren't numbers you typically associate with review platforms, where anonymous, incentive-driven content has long been the norm.

The feedback trap brands keep falling into

De Bold is direct about where brands go wrong. "A lot of brands are still confusing polish with credibility. They over-brief, over-direct, and sometimes unintentionally signal that positive content is the goal. The result is content that looks good on the surface but feels less real."

The most common version of this mistake, she says, is treating a five-star average as the gold standard. "There is no such thing as a product that is universally loved by everyone. Consumer trust is actually lower if it is all five-star reviews. It looks suspicious. You are better off with a solid 4.4 out of 5."

The deeper issue is one of framing. "Brands often treat feedback as a content asset first and a learning tool second, which is backwards. The most valuable feedback is not the most flattering. It is the most useful."

Why this matters for AI discovery

The timing of the report is deliberate. As AI tools become the front door for product discovery, the signals those systems are reading matter enormously.

"AI is increasingly acting like the first layer of discovery," de Bold says. "It is summarizing reviews, pulling patterns from consumer language, and helping shape what people see before they ever click."

That changes the stakes for brands generating consumer content. Vague, promotional, or obviously engineered reviews don't just mislead consumers. They potentially mislead the systems making recommendations on their behalf. "If the available content is specific, balanced, experience-based, and written in natural language, it becomes much more useful, both for people and for the systems interpreting sentiment."

Her framing is blunt: "Trust is no longer just a brand outcome. It is now part of the discovery infrastructure."

Generations aligned, not divided

One of the more interesting findings in the report is how consistent trust levels are across age groups. Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X all report similarly high comfort with honest feedback and similar confidence that brands are listening.

"Different age groups express themselves differently, but they all want the same basic thing: to be heard without being managed," de Bold says.

For brands trying to build feedback programs that work across a wide audience, that's a useful signal. You don't need a different approach for every generation. You need the same core conditions: clarity, respect, and genuine product alignment.

The UGC playbook needs an update

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Merisa ☺️🌸 (@doitforthepeacewithreese)

De Bold co-founded Butterly (then called, ChickAdvisor) in 2006, one of Canada's first product review platforms, so she has a longer view on how consumer voice has evolved than most. "What has changed is the scale, the speed, and the number of places consumer voices show up. In the early days, reviews were something people had to actively look for. Today those voices are everywhere."

What hasn't changed: "People still want to hear from someone like me who has actually used the product and has no reason to pretend. That was true in 2006, and it is still true now."

But the old UGC playbook, she argues, needs to catch up. "The old playbook often rewarded volume, polish, and content that looked good in-feed. The new playbook has to reward credibility, relevance, specificity, and trust. The brands that win will be the ones that treat consumer voices as a trust asset, not just a content source."

What to do with it

For brand managers looking for a practical takeaway, de Bold's advice cuts through the noise. "Trust goes both ways. Brands that trust their products in the hands of consumers show that they stand behind their products and want to grow and evolve with the changing needs of their customers."

The result, she says, is often more compelling than anything a brand could engineer. "Sometimes the most compelling content is a simple on-camera review from a regular looking person. Brands that win embrace that."

The full 2026 Trust Index is available at butterly.com. Butterly was co-founded by Ali de Bold, who also co-founded ChickAdvisor in 2006. A notable feature of their model is that every Advocate application is reviewed individually by a human, which the company says supports better product-to-person matching and higher quality insight.

About Ali:
Ali de Bold is the Founder and CEO of Butterly and co-founder of ChickAdvisor. She co-founded ChickAdvisor in 2006 after seeing a gap in credible, consumer-led product reviews, particularly for the products women use every day.

Building on more than a decade of brand and consumer-community work, de Bold launched Butterly in 2020 as a platform that lets brands build and manage their own communities, run product trials, collect ratings and reviews, and conduct consumer surveys, with brand-owned first-party data at the centre.

Based in Kitchener, Ontario, she is known for her focus on trust, authentic user-generated content, and the evolving role of AI in how consumers discover and evaluate brands.