Agentic Research

The Trust Gap in Skincare

September 16, 2026

We just released an industry-first, state of category report on skincare, across more than 633 skincare brands with a leading presence in the UK, US, and Europe.

This is not a report about AI. It is a report about what happens to ordinary products, ordinary brands, and ordinary people when the information layer of commerce becomes machine-made.

Commerce is filling with claims few can verify, generated at industrial scale and repeated with total confidence. This is not nuisance-level fakery. Skincare is a high-consideration purchase: people put these products on their skin, on their children, and use them to treat medical conditions. When a brand sells more because of an exaggerated claim, an honest rival loses a sale it should have won, and the person who bought the product finds out on their own skin whether the claim was true.

Regulators are already acting on this. Within three weeks this spring, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld complaints against three major brands over "clinically proven" claims resting on studies that could not support them. These rulings did not land on fringe products, but on the mainstream brands people actually buy and put on their skin.

So we measured the gap across the category. M11 agents analyzed 633 brands and held every claim to one standard: it has to be verifiable against accessible evidence, whether the brand's own or independent. Accessible means a person, or the AI reading for them, can reach it from where the claim is made.

The scan reads each brand's own product pages and the public material around them, and pulls out the claims a person shopping would actually read. From supermarket staples to luxury houses, too many brands make claims that cannot be verified: most point to a study they imply but never show, a smaller share show no proof at all, and a few are flatly contradicted by the brand's own page.

The cost is real: people put products on their skin that are sold on claims no one can verify, honest brands lose sales to rivals with bigger marketing budgets, and each unverifiable claim weakens the trust the whole category depends on. AI makes it cheaper every month to imply proof that was never there.

This report is written for the brands that do it right. It names what the laggards still get away with, shows what the best already prove, and flags what AI is about to change for everyone.