Your Audience Already Knows Your Social Feed Is Fake

We're wrapping up 2025, and over the next few days, we'll be sharing key insights from our year-end report: AI in Marketing 2025 Annual Report.

The report will be available for all subscribers to download in full for free from the 22nd of December.

2025 was the year platforms finally admitted what your team already knew: the feeds have gone synthetic.

By mid-year, generative AI accounted for 57% of all online content. Not "some accounts." Not "a growing trend." More than half. Meta launched Vibes—an AI-only video feed. Pinterest added "see fewer AI" controls. YouTube and TikTok mandated synthetic media labels.

The platforms saw the flood coming and tried to build seawalls. But here's the part that should keep you awake: consumers saw it coming faster.

The numbers are brutal.

77% of consumers can identify AI-generated content. 68% trust it less than human work. When customers believe you're using AI (whether you are or not), brand trust drops 144%.

But wait, it gets worse.

That executive-customer trust gap you've been ignoring? 90% of executives think their companies are trusted. Only 30% of customers agree. That's not a perception gap. That's a credibility crisis dressed up in quarterly reports.

And your engagement metrics? They're not just declining. They're collapsing. Instagram's median engagement rate fell to 0.50% in 2025, down 28% year-over-year. Facebook posts reach 2.2% of followers on average. Instagram hits 9.5%.

Translation: Your social media manager isn't underperforming. The entire game changed underneath you.

Here's where it gets interesting. Consumers are 2.4 times more likely to view user-generated content as authentic than brand content. 73% show greater loyalty to brands they perceive as authentic.

The influencer marketing sector—now $32.55 billion—tells the real story: nano-influencers (1-10K followers) command 38.7% of partnerships. Celebrity influencers? 11%.

The market is screaming: Authenticity beats reach. Genuine beats polished. Humans beat algorithms.

Yet 42% of marketers are using generative AI for social copy. And platform algorithms are responding by prioritizing "meaningful interactions"—sends matter more than likes now. The algorithm learned what your audience already knew: surface-level engagement is dead.

Stop treating authenticity as a creative direction. It's infrastructure now.

By 2026, the strategic divide won't be between brands that use AI and those that don't. It'll be between organizations that have built systematic approaches to demonstrate provably human contributions and those that are still pretending their feeds aren't synthetic.

That means:

Over 80% of social users engage with AI-personalized content. But platforms increasingly favor human-created material demonstrating authenticity. The algorithm isn't neutral—it's taking sides.

Technologist Kevin Rose predicted social's future would center on "micro communities of trusted users" with "proof of heartbeat" verification. Reddit called undisclosed AI accounts "deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level."

The platforms aren't policing AI content because they hate innovation. They're policing it because user trust is their business model. When trust collapses, so does advertising revenue.

The question isn't whether your brand should use AI for social content. The question is whether you have a systematic way to prove what's human—before your audience assumes everything is synthetic.

Because they're already assuming.

By 2026, authenticity infrastructure will separate market leaders from volume optimizers. The companies still measuring engagement rates while trust metrics crater will wonder why their social "presence" stopped driving business results.

The answer will be evident to everyone except them.

— Torsten & Peter

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