[2604.04263] Commercial Persuasion in AI-Mediated Conversations

Computer Science > Computers and Society arXiv:2604.04263 (cs) [Submitted on 5 Apr 2026] Title:Commercial Persuasion in AI-Mediated Conversations Authors:Francesco Salvi, Alejandro Cuevas, Manoel Horta Ribeiro View a PDF of the paper titled Commercial Persuasion in AI-Mediated Conversations, by Francesco Salvi and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: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 (61.2% vs. 22.4%), while the vast majority of participants fail to detect any promotional steering. Explicit "Sponsored" labels do not significantly reduce persuasion, and instructing the model to conceal its intent makes its influence nearly invisible (detection accuracy < 10%). Altogether, our results indicate that conversational AI can covertly redirect consumer choices at scale, and that existing transparency mechanisms may ...