A May 2025 study by the marketing platform Whop found that roughly 40 percent of Gen Z social media users follow at least one virtual influencer, and about a third have made a purchasing decision based on one. That is a striking adoption curve for a creator format older audiences still describe as off-putting. The same character that reads as “fake” to a 45 year old can read as “honest” to a 19 year old. Both groups are looking at the same Instagram grid; their conclusions come from very different definitions of authenticity. This article unpacks why.
The Headline Number: 40 Percent of Gen Z Already Follow One
The Whop survey, reported by Digiday, put Gen Z’s virtual influencer following at around 40 percent. The cohort treats Lil Miquela, Aitana Lopez, and dozens of regional VTubers as just another creator type in the feed, not a novelty. Purchase action follows attention: roughly one in three respondents said a synthetic character had nudged them toward a purchase.
The adoption pattern is not happening evenly across age groups. Older respondents in similar data sets are more likely to find virtual creators uncanny, distracting, or untrustworthy. The split is sharp enough to suggest something more than novelty bias. Gen Z is using a different test for what counts as real.
What Authenticity Actually Means to Gen Z
In a multi-generational qualitative comparison published in De Gruyter, Gen Z and Millennials defined influencer authenticity in noticeably different terms. Gen Z participants framed authenticity through personal connection, vulnerability, and consistency between a creator’s public posts and the values they claim to hold. Millennials in the same study leaned more on professionalism, polish, and the appearance of editorial credibility.
Read against that frame, a virtual influencer becomes easier to defend, not harder. The character does not claim to be a person who actually eats the protein bar in real life. The team is open about the construction. To a Gen Z viewer who values transparency, that openness can register as more honest than a human creator pretending a sponsored post is a spontaneous discovery.
This is the same audience that built de-influencing into a content genre. The instinct that drives someone to call out a fake review is the same instinct that, surprisingly, gives a confessed CGI character the benefit of the doubt. Honesty about construction is doing the work that polish used to do for older audiences.
The Disclosure Gap (and Who Notices)
The picture gets more complicated once you measure who actually realizes the account is synthetic. The Influencer Marketing Factory virtual influencers survey reported that roughly 42 percent of Gen Z and Millennial respondents follow a virtual influencer without initially realizing the account is virtual. That is not a small share. It complicates the tidy story about Gen Z choosing transparent CGI characters because they prefer transparency.
What the data suggests instead is two coexisting groups of followers. One group knows the persona is synthetic, sees that openness as a virtue, and stays engaged. The other group never registered the disclosure cues at all and is reacting to the content as if it were human. Both groups can show up in the same engagement metric. Both look like product-market fit on the dashboard.
For a deeper look at how the disclosure question is evolving, the virtual influencer disclosure write up walks through current FTC guidance on AI labeling. The short version: the bar for clear disclosure is rising precisely because audiences cannot always self-identify what they are watching.
Why “Constructed” Reads as Honest to Younger Eyes
There is a generational reading at work here. Gen Z grew up with creators who openly used filters, ring lights, batch-recorded a week of TikToks in one afternoon, and disclosed brand deals in the first caption line. The constructed nature of social content is the default assumption, not a betrayal of one.
A photorealistic human creator who refuses to acknowledge their editing pipeline can read, to that cohort, as the dishonest one. A CGI character that opens with “made by The Diigitals” is doing what the audience already assumes everyone else is doing, just out loud.
A 2025 Gen Z perspective published in the Journal of Nonprofit and Public Sector Marketing finds something related. When Gen Z respondents felt a virtual influencer aligned with their own aspirational identity, they expressed a “desire to model” the character, even knowing it was synthetic. The bond was not contingent on believing the avatar was a person. It was contingent on the character standing for values the viewer recognized.
This connects to a broader pattern in how Gen Z thinks about virtual influencer authenticity: the question is not “is this person real” but “is this point of view consistent.”
Where the Goodwill Has Limits
It would overstate the case to say Gen Z accepts every virtual creator without friction. The same body of research flags two recurring breakpoints.
The first is human mimicry that hides itself. Photorealistic avatars that lean into being mistaken for people, especially in sponsored content, draw the strongest negative reactions. Qualitative studies report Gen Z participants saying they would feel “cheated” or “disappointed” by a sponsored campaign from a human-mimic virtual influencer they had assumed was real.
The second is brand mismatch. When a synthetic character pushes a product that requires lived human experience to endorse (medical treatments, parenting advice, grief products), the gap between persona and pitch becomes visible. The character no longer reads as honest, because the honesty was always about owning what it could and could not credibly speak to.
Gen Z’s permission slip for virtual influencers is real, but it is conditional. The character has to be open about being a character, and the message has to fit something a character can credibly carry.
What This Means for Anyone Building a Persona
A few practical takeaways for teams building or partnering with virtual creators.
First, do not hide the construction. Lead with the studio name in the bio, surface the team in occasional content, and label sponsored posts unambiguously. The audience that finds you honest is the audience that already knows.
Second, treat consistency as the authenticity proxy. Gen Z is reading the persona’s continuity across posts, the through-line in what the character stands for, the predictability of voice. That is far more measurable than the elusive “feels real” metric, and it is what disciplined creator teams sometimes call brand discipline.
Third, accept that a chunk of your audience will not register the disclosure. Design content that holds up even for the reader who missed the synthetic-character cue, because the FTC, platform policies, and increasingly audiences themselves will hold you to that bar regardless.
Vinfluencer’s own work in AI companion software starts from a related principle: a synthetic conversational partner is most useful when it is honest about what it is and consistent about how it shows up. The mechanics that make virtual influencers credible to Gen Z map onto the mechanics that make any AI-driven persona feel like a presence worth keeping in your week.
FAQ
What percentage of Gen Z follow virtual influencers?
A May 2025 study by the marketing platform Whop, reported by Digiday, put the figure at roughly 40 percent of Gen Z social media users following at least one virtual influencer, with about a third saying they had made a purchase as a result.
Do Gen Z followers know virtual influencers are not real?
Not always. The Influencer Marketing Factory survey found that about 42 percent of Gen Z and Millennial respondents follow a virtual influencer without initially realizing the account is virtual. Two groups of followers coexist: those who know and value the transparency, and those who never registered the disclosure cues.
Why do younger audiences see virtual influencers as more authentic?
Qualitative research suggests Gen Z defines authenticity through consistency of values and openness about construction, rather than through the “realness” of the creator. A character that openly admits it is CGI can read as more honest than a human creator who hides their editing pipeline.
Are there cases where Gen Z rejects virtual influencers?
Yes. Negative reactions concentrate on photorealistic avatars that try to pass as human in sponsored content, and on personas pushing products that demand lived human experience to credibly endorse, such as medical treatments or parenting advice.