Australian brands spent $830 million on influencer marketing last year. New research shows 43 per cent of consumers trust it least of all.
Australian brands spent A$830 million on influencer marketing last year according to Meltwater and We Are Social’s Digital 2026 report, and that figure is set to pass a billion dollars in 2026.
Much of that spend is being directed into a channel consumers are increasingly sceptical of, and in our latest research, conducted with Oaktree Insights and Consulting, influencers were named the least trusted source when Australians research products and services. We asked people to name the source they trust least. Influencers topped the list. Almost half (43%) named influencers as their least trusted source, the highest “least trusted” score of any source we tested. Only 9.5 per cent of respondents named influencers a most trusted source.
Set that against the money. Australian influencer spend by brands rose 13.5 per cent last year and is now the second fastest growing digital advertising vertical in the country, only behind online retail. Budgets are increasing in step with the distrust. Spend is rising fastest where trust is lowest, and it isn’t limited to a certain generation either.
Distrust of influencers runs across every generation, and it peaks in the middle. Among Gen X, 47.7 per cent name influencers as their least trusted source. For Millennials it is 44.5 per cent. Even among Gen Z, the cohort raised inside these feeds, familiarity doesn’t equal trust, with 40.8 per cent naming influencers as their least trusted source.
Part of what is driving this is that people can no longer tellwhat’s real and what’s an ad. Nearly eight in ten Australians (78%) say it is getting harder to separate independent content from sponsored content online. Among the reasons people give for finding online research harder than it used to be, unreliable influencer content ranks near the top, and 30.7 per cent say influencer content simply feels too biased to rely on. When everything looks like it might be sponsored, people just stop believing any of it.
So why do brands keep spending? Because influence still works at the top of the sales funnel and it still gets people’s attention. Just over 40 per cent of Australians say influencer content shapes what they consider buying, rising to 47.2 per cent among Gen Z. The content puts products into the frame and still generates consideration. Influencers are great at making you think “oh, that looks interesting.” But not enough to make you think “I trust this enough to actually buy it.”
Influencer marketing still gets brands noticed. The problem is that notice without trust creates a leaky funnel.
Manufacturing awareness without credibility is expensive. Brands pay to fill the top and lose people before the bottom, then pay again next quarter to refill it. Brands are paying a fortune to get noticed, but notice isn’t the same as trust.
Distrust doesn’t necessarily manifest as nobody buying. It shows up as rising acquisition costs, soft repeat purchase patterns, and a brand that has to keep renting attention because it never converted that attention into belief. The billion dollars is not buying nothing, but it is buying less than it should and costing more than it needs to.
This doesn’t mean influencer marketing is finished, but it does signal the lazy version is, including the all expenses paid trip, the one-off sponsored post, and the polished “casual” product placement that fools no one. None of that is working the way it used to.
The point is not that influencer marketing no longer works. It is that trust now sits with fewer creators, in more specific contexts, and is much harder to buy at scale. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that the right creator, in the right context, can still move a sceptic. Worldwide, among consumers who already trust a food and lifestyle influencer, 62 per cent say they would trust or consider trusting a food company they previously distrusted if that influencer endorsed it. Trust transfers, but only where it already exists, and it is earned through consistency and real expertise rather than bought by the post.
The task for brands and marketers is to stop confusing reach with belief.
Measure credibility, not just impressions.
Support creators who have built something durable with an audience, over those who can only deliver a reach number. And treat owned, transparent, demonstrably honest content as the increasingly valuable asset it is becoming, because so much of the feed is now assumed to be for sale.
Australians have stopped believing, but that doesn’t mean they have stopped watching. For an industry spending the better part of a billion dollars, that distinction is the one that should be setting the budget.
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