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Asked in their own words, without being offered reviews as an option, Canadians named reviews five times more often than price as the reason they changed their mind about a purchase, and 83.5% say they now research more than they did five years ago.
Kitchener, ON, Tuesday, October 6, 2026 — When Canadians describe, unprompted, what actually changed their mind about a purchase, they don’t say price or convenience, they say reviews. Nearly four in ten respondents, 39.5%, named them specifically in an open-ended question that never listed reviews as a choice, more than five times the number who mentioned price (7.8%). The finding comes from a new national survey of 2,220 Canadian consumers by Butterly, a Canadian consumer advocacy platform.
Other notable findings from the survey include:
When sources disagree, most Canadians side with a review over a brand or an expert. Told to pick which source they’d believe if information conflicted, 69.3% chose the opinion of someone they know personally, and reviews came in second at 57.4%, ahead of expert opinion, independent articles, and anything a brand says about itself.
Butterly founder and CEO, Ali de Bold, has watched that shift happen since establishing the company in 2006. “When we started, almost nobody in Canada could find or leave a review anywhere online,” she says. “Now it’s the first thing people bring up when you ask what changed their mind.”
The trust extends to brands shoppers have never heard of. Given a straight choice between a familiar brand with average reviews and an unfamiliar one with excellent reviews, 48.7% chose the unfamiliar brand, only 20% stayed loyal to the name they knew. Another 28.4% said they’d switch to a cheaper option outright if its reviews were strong enough. For a challenger brand trying to unseat an established competitor, that’s a real opening.
Canadians are also putting more into that research than they ever used to. 83.5% say they do more of it than they did five years ago, and there’s no longer a typical amount of time it takes. The most common answer, at 34.7%, was that it depends too much on the product to say.
Shoppers look for signs of authenticity in online reviews. What raises suspicion is texture: phrasing that repeats itself (55.9%), ratings that are suspiciously uniform (35.9%), and a tone that reads more like marketing copy than a shopper’s actual experience (34.7%), all ranking above suspecting AI involvement outright (25.8%). Shoppers cross-check what they read, too: more than a quarter, 27.6%, look at how recent and specific a negative review is before deciding if it matters, and about the same number, 27.3%, check whether other reviewers mention the same complaint. “There was only good reviews and some before and after pictures that really looked photoshopped,” one respondent wrote of a skincare purchase.
“A repeated phrase has always been a red flag, long before anyone worried about AI,” de Bold says. “We saw the same problem with copy-pasted reviews years ago. Now it’s a machine doing the copying instead of a person, but shoppers are still catching the same thing.”
AI itself continues to lag in consumer trust. Just 4.8% of respondents say they’d rely on an AI-generated summary alone, while 30% treat one as a starting point and still read the underlying reviews themselves.
For complete survey results, please see below or visit: https://butterly.com/richmedia/resources/Butterly-Q3-2026-Everyday-Buying-Trust-v2.pdf
Methodology
Butterly fielded this survey among its volunteer advocate community between August 25 and September 8, 2026, collecting 2,220 completed responses. Every respondent answered every closed-ended question, giving a consistent base of n = 2,220 across the findings above. The survey was conducted in English.
About Butterly
A leading consumer advocacy platform, founded in 2006 as ChickAdvisor, Butterly helps brands turn real consumer experiences into authentic reviews, social content, and measurable sales growth. Through its unified platform, brands build credibility, generate social proof, gather strategic insights, and influence purchase decisions online and offline. Butterly has spent 20 years working with brands including Chapman’s Ice Cream, Spin Master, and Canadian Tire.
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