The Credibility Bar Has Moved

Maine audiences have always been skeptical of claims without proof. What’s changed is how quickly they can tell.

Something has shifted in how people evaluate what they read online and I don’t think most organizations have fully caught up to it yet.

It didn’t happen all at once. It happened the way most behavioral changes do: gradually, then unmistakably. Over the past several years, people have been trained — by social media, by the news, by their own experience of being misled — to read online content with a more skeptical eye than they used to. And that means most of us have gotten good at spotting the difference between something that was written by someone who knows a subject and something that was assembled to sound like it. That instinct, once sharpened, doesn’t just stay confined to Facebook. And increasingly, it shows up the moment someone lands on a business website.

I’ve been watching this pattern develop for a while now, and what strikes me most is how much the question has changed. Readers used to ask: is this useful? Now the first question often is: is this real?

AI accelerated something that was already in motion

It would be easy to put this entirely on AI-generated content, and AI is absolutely part of the story. When the cost of producing polished, grammatically correct, professionally toned content drops to nearly zero, the volume of that content increases dramatically. Readers have noticed; not always consciously, but in the way that matters most: they’ve started trusting it less. The polish itself became a yellow flag rather than a signal of quality.

However, I don’t think this purely an AI story, because that lets too many businesses off the hook. The credibility problem predates the rise of AI tools. What AI did was accelerate a shift that was already underway and make it harder to ignore. The real issue is that generic, claim-heavy content has always been easier to produce than specific, evidence-backed content. AI just made the generic easier still and made readers correspondingly better at recognizing it.

What skepticism actually looks like in practice

We’ve spent more than two decades working with Maine businesses, and one of the consistent patterns we see is that Maine audiences have always had a lower tolerance for overstatement than national marketing frameworks tend to assume. This isn’t new. What’s new is how that skepticism now operates.

Consider something as simple as how a business describes its own history on a website. A phrase like “trusted by Maine residents for decades” is the kind of language that probably felt solid and credible when it was written. It signals longevity. It signals local roots. But in the current environment, it doesn’t pass the test the way it once did, because it’s exactly the kind of phrase that could have been written by anyone, about any business, without knowing a single specific fact about either one.

Making a super simple change to “Serving our community since 1974” changes everything. It gives the reader something to evaluate on their own terms. A year is checkable. A year is specific. A year couldn’t have been written by someone who didn’t actually know the business. That specificity is now doing work it didn’t used to have to do; not because readers have become cynical, but because they’ve become more discerning about the difference between a claim and a fact.

The three mindsets are not all processing this the same way

Our Mindsets of Maine research identifies three attitudinal segments that shape how Maine audiences evaluate messages, and this shift in credibility assessment is landing differently across all three.

Change Seekers — the segment most open to innovation and forward momentum — are probably least rattled by AI-generated content as a category, but they’re not immune to the credibility question. What they notice is when content feels templated rather than considered. They’re looking for evidence of genuine thinking, not just professional presentation.

Proud Mainers are evaluating for local authenticity. Generic polish is the opposite of what builds trust with this group. Language that could describe any business anywhere is language that implicitly signals this business doesn’t understand Maine or doesn’t think it needs to. Specificity, local context, and demonstrated community knowledge are what move the needle here.

Disparagers have essentially been right about this all along. Their default skepticism toward claims that outrun proof has always been a feature, not a flaw. What’s changed is that the broader population is now catching up to where Disparagers already were. The good news is that Disparagers convert. Once a business earns their trust through demonstrated specificity and honest representation, they become their biggest champions. The bad news is that generic content closes that door before the conversation starts.

What this means for how you present your business online

What I’m suggesting isn’t that you need to overhaul your website or panic about AI. It’s that you should understand the content that’s going to hold up for a more skeptical reader isn’t more content; it’s more authentic content. Real numbers. Real years. Real locations. Real results. Language that could only have been written by someone who actually knows the business, its history, and the people it serves.

That’s not a new idea. But it’s one that matters more now than it did five years ago, and more now than it will five years from today.

We’re taking a close look at how Maine audiences actually navigate the research process for major purchases — what they search for, what they look at, and what makes them trust what they find. That research is coming soon. What we’re already confident about is this: showing up in search is the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it. What happens when someone arrives matters at least as much as whether they get there at all.