Commercial Persuasion in AI-Mediated Conversations
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become a primary interface between users and the web, companies face growing economic incentives to embed commercial influence into AI-mediated conversations. We present two preregistered experiments (N = 2,012) in which participants selected a book to receive from a large eBook catalog using either a traditional search engine or a conversational LLM agent powered by one of five frontier models. Unbeknownst to participants, a fifth of all products were randomly designated as sponsored and promoted in different ways. We find that LLM-driven persuasion nearly triples the rate at which users select sponsored products compared to traditional search placement (6...
| Authors | Francesco Salvi, Alejandro Cuevas, Manoel Horta Ribeiro |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 5 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 April 2026 |
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