Trust in AI-Driven Avatar Marketing: A Bibliometric Analysis of Ethical Concerns and Research Trends

AI systems have fundamentally changed the way brands communicate with consumers. Avatars, virtual influencers, and AI personas have become social actors in the brand consumer relationship, relying on anthropomorphic design and ongoing interaction. Given their growing influence, trust has become a central concept in research on consumers’ responses to AI-driven marketing. This study presents how trust is conceptualized in AI-driven marketing with a focus on avatars and virtual influencers. Our study employs a bibliometric analysis of 2888 articles published between 2021 and 2025 from Web of Science. We have found that avatar marketing is a fragmented research domain, and that trust plays an instrumental role in achieving marketing outcomes. Transparency and fairness, ethical concerns discussed in the literature, hold peripheral positions, and AI regulation appears as the most isolated concept in the cluster analysis. Although trust occupies a central position, it is conceptualized for its functional role, not for its ethical dimension. This is a clear literature gap that is translated into the field’s lack of a conceptual framework to evaluate the legitimacy of AI-driven marketing practices. Our study supports a reframing of trust, from a dependent variable of marketing efficiency to a central ethical criterion.