Claude’s Consideration score among US Gen Z adults nearly doubled in the second quarter of 2026, climbing from 14.2% to 28.1%, the highest score of any brand in YouGov’s newest ranking. OpenAI more than doubled its own score too, from 10.1% to 22.1%. Both landed in the same top ten list as Johnnie Walker, REI, and Dove Baby. A year ago that sentence would have made no sense. Now it is a brand tracking dataset, and it says something worth sitting with: a growing share of Gen Z is starting to think about Claude and OpenAI the way they think about a sneaker brand or a streaming service, not a utility.
The number that should worry you more than it excites you
Consideration is not trust. A separate 19-market YouGov survey put US trust in AI assistants at just 28%, a full 42 points behind the trust people place in a traditional search engine, and further behind maps and navigation apps again. Put the two studies next to each other and the gap is uncomfortable for anyone building a content strategy around AI platforms: Gen Z will apparently consider buying from Claude or OpenAI, but a much smaller share of Americans overall are ready to trust either one to hand them a fact they can act on.
Consideration moved on advertising, not content
What actually moved this quarter’s rankings is instructive. Johnnie Walker’s Consideration score rose from 7.5% to 20.0% behind a “Keep Walking” campaign running across streaming, social, and out-of-home media, not a content strategy. REI’s score climbed from 9.0% to 17.2% behind a spring sale that discounted more than 6,000 products and picked up lifestyle press coverage. Anthropic used its first Super Bowl spot to make one point: that Claude would stay free of advertising. OpenAI ran its own high-profile Super Bowl campaign built around Codex. None of the five brands that moved the most this quarter did it primarily through generative engine optimization or AI citations. They did it with paid media, promotions, and press, the same tools marketing has always used.
What this means for a small marketing team
If your 2026 plan is entirely weighted toward earning AI citations, this ranking is worth forwarding to whoever approved that budget. A ten-person agency spending its whole content budget chasing mentions inside ChatGPT or Claude answers is optimizing for a metric that, on this data, moves slower and less reliably than a well-timed sale or a genuinely good ad. That does not mean AI visibility work is wasted. It means it should sit alongside brand-building spend, not replace it, especially while trust in the answers themselves is still this low.
Where the real opportunity sits
The opportunity is not chasing Gen Z’s rising Consideration numbers for AI brands. It is closing the trust gap in your own content, because that is the part the research says is still up for grabs. Named sources, verifiable data, and a visible methodology are what move trust scores, not just volume of AI-optimized content. A brand that publishes a document explaining exactly how it tested a claim will get cited and believed longer than one that publishes ten thin FAQ pages hoping to get scraped. This probably will not show up in a dashboard next month. The trust gap closes slowly, if a brand closes it at all, and there is a real chance most of this quarter’s Consideration gains evaporate as fast as they appeared if the products behind them stumble on accuracy.
Editor’s note: This area changes quickly, so check the latest platform policy and data before making decisions based on AI brand tracking.
We covered the mechanics of this same trust problem when AI Overviews crossed 43% of searches: being recognized by an AI system and being trusted by the person reading its answer are two different jobs, and only one of them is measured by most of the tools marketers are buying right now.