47% of skincare brands can't prove their claims to agents

Your product claims were written for a human who would not check them. AI shopping agents check. A report published September 16 by M11 Labs, an agentic commerce research lab, examined 633 skincare brands and found that 47% had no independently verifiable evidence behind the claims their products are sold on. Skincare is the test category. The mechanic applies to anything you sell.

What actually happened

M11's Trust Gap in Skincare report is the first in a planned series of category studies. According to trade coverage of the release, the study analyzed more than 15,000 evidence captures and found that 58% of product claims pointed to research that was not publicly available, and that only about 1 in 20 evidence links directly confirmed the claim it was attached to.

The distinction in that last number is the whole story. A brand can have real clinical data and still fail, because the link goes to a study abstract that does not mention the claim, or a PDF with no machine-readable connection to the SKU. The evidence exists. Nothing can follow it.

M11 also runs OpenMarket, a marketplace where brand agents compete for a recommendation and a verification layer checks claims in real time. The company's own site reports that 1 in 6 seller claims get refused in that setting.

Worth saying plainly: this is a vendor publishing research that makes the case for its product. Treat the specific percentages as directional. The underlying mechanic is not in dispute — an agent that cannot resolve a claim to a source has two options, and recommending you anyway is not the safe one.

Why unverifiable claims matter for your business

For twenty years, product copy optimized for two audiences: a search engine matching keywords, and a human who would skim. Neither one demanded proof. An agent asked to find "a retinol serum with published clinical support" is doing something different — it is filtering, and unresolvable claims are the cheapest thing to filter out.

The fix is unglamorous and mostly structural. Every substantive claim on a product page should resolve to something a machine can fetch and read: a public study URL, a test report, a certification number — placed in structured data rather than in a paragraph of marketing copy or a footnote graphic. Put the evidence in your product feed and your schema markup, not only in the PDF your legal team approved. If a claim has no backing you can point at, the honest move is to stop making it, because an agent that cannot verify it will quietly rank you below a competitor who can.

This is catalog hygiene work, not a rebrand. It is also the kind of thing that compounds: the same structured evidence that satisfies an agent satisfies a regulator, a retail buyer, and a customer who actually clicks.

Sources: M11 Labs, e-commerce.news.