Original title: First Impressions: How Placement Shapes the Influence of AI Summaries
Wang Claire, Agam Goyal, Frederick Choi, Koustuv Saha +1 · September 2026
Online stores now use artificial intelligence to summarize customer reviews. Researchers wanted to know how much these AI summaries sway shoppers. They tested this by showing people product reviews and AI summaries on Amazon in different orders. People read either positive or negative versions of each source. The team found that both sources altered opinions, but presentation orderthe sequence in which AI summaries and user reviews are shown mattered most. Whichever source people saw first anchored their view. This means it set their first impression, and only user reviews were powerful enough to change that original anchor. Negative summaries also carried more weight than positive ones. Finally, shoppers said they preferred reading real reviews, but they failed to realize just how strongly the AI summaries actually shaped their thinking.
You walk into a restaurant and the host immediately says the special is the salmon. Even if the menu later shows better options, that first suggestion lingers in your mind. Now suppose a friend later whispers that the salmon was bad—then your opinion might shift. In this paper, the AI summary is like the host's first suggestion, and only user reviews can be that friend who overrides it.
On e-commerce sites like Amazon, AI summaries are supposed to help you decide quickly. But where they appear relative to user reviews can unknowingly anchor your judgment. This means you might trust a bad summary just because it came first, unless a user review comes along to break that anchor.
The abstract notes this study used only Amazon's AI summaries and one product review context. It does not test other platforms, longer summaries, or repeated exposure. The experiment may not capture real-world browsing where users see multiple products and summaries over time. Generalizability to other domains like news or medical advice remains unclear.
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First Impressions: How Placement Shapes the Influence of AI Summaries — Wang Claire, Agam Goyal, Frederick Choi et al.
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.