Why Lack of Trust in the Data Is Still Attribution’s #1 Problem in 2026

Listen to enough calls with prospects and a pattern emerges immediately.

“People still don’t trust the data.”

Trust isn’t something concrete or tangible, yet it is the core of whether a system is used or shelved. It’s the human judgment about whether the numbers in front of you are safe to act on. And across the conversations we’ve had this year — plus new research from Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma in The State of Marketing Attribution 2026 — the same conclusion keeps surfacing: the technology got better, but the trust problem didn’t go away. If anything, more data and more AI-generated dashboards have made it easier to be confidently wrong.