Nine in ten American adults now report at least one deliberate cost-saving habit, according to survey findings Adtaxi published on August 25, 2026, and the single behaviour that lands hardest on brand owners is the four in ten who say they have moved to cheaper labels.

The Denver agency released its 2026 Consumer & Economy Survey from its Colorado headquarters, drawing on a poll of more than 1,100 United States adults conducted through SurveyMonkey and fielded beginning in May 2026. The headline claim is that 93% of respondents actively use at least one cost-saving behaviour, a figure Adtaxi presents as evidence that household budget management has settled into routine rather than emergency practice.

That framing deserves examination before the individual numbers are read. A 93% union figure across a checklist of eight or more behaviours is close to arithmetically inevitable: any respondent who ticks a single box joins the total. The seven behaviours Adtaxi itemised sum to roughly 260 percentage points, which implies an average of about 2.8 habits per adopting household. The more informative reading sits in the distribution rather than the aggregate.

Where the cuts actually land

Comparing prices more often leads the list at 49%, according to Adtaxi. Eating at home follows at 42%, switching to lower-cost brands at 40%, and buying fewer discretionary items at 39%. A further 34% report waiting for sales. Coupons and cash-back offers and delaying major purchases each register 28%.

The 40% brand-switching figure is the one with a direct revenue counterpart. Price comparison and home cooking redistribute where money is spent within a category or move it out of one entirely. Brand switching moves share between named competitors, and it is the behaviour least likely to reverse automatically when input costs ease, because a household that has trialled a cheaper label and found it acceptable has acquired information it does not lose.

Big-ticket categories absorb the sharper reductions. Vacations and dining out sit at the top of the list of purchases being delayed or cancelled, with roughly 33% of consumers naming each, according to the release. Adtaxi also reports that over half of respondents expect essential household spending to rise while discretionary spending is far more likely to decline. The release does not publish the exact percentage behind the "over half" phrasing, nor the discretionary counterpart, which limits how precisely the split can be modelled.

Value stopped meaning cheapest

The survey separates price sensitivity from bargain-hunting. Asked to identify the most important characteristics of good value, 47% of respondents selected high quality for the price, a share Adtaxi says outperformed lower price on its own.

The release states the finding two ways. Its subheading says 47% report that quality for the price matters most for value; the body text says 47% selected it as one of the most important characteristics. Those are different questions. A multi-select item that allows several answers produces higher percentages than a forced ranking, and the release does not specify which instrument was used. The distinction matters for anyone attempting to compare the figure against price-perception tracking from other sources.

"Everything starts with the consumer's financial mindset. Before marketers can understand purchasing behavior, they need to understand how households perceive their own financial stability," said Murry Woronoff, Director of Research at Adtaxi. "Our survey found consumers aren't withdrawing from the marketplace - they're adopting practical habits that help preserve purchasing power."

Woronoff is the only named source quoted in the material Adtaxi distributed.

The search finding is narrower than the headline

Adtaxi promotes the survey partly on the claim that search engines remain the primary tool consumers use for product research and price comparison. The supporting number in the release is different in kind: 36%, described as over one-third of consumers, say they use search and AI as their preferred tool for planned shopping and comparing prices.

Two qualifications follow from that phrasing. The measurement bundles conventional search with AI assistants into a single response option, so it cannot be read as evidence about search engines specifically. And 36% is a plurality, not a majority. Adtaxi says the combined category outperformed social media, retailer websites, and streaming television advertising, a comparison basket that mixes destinations with an advertising format, which further complicates any read across to channel budgets.

Independent measurement of the same question has produced considerably wider figures when the categories are kept separate. Smarty Marketing, surveying 1,295 United States residents with data updated on May 12, 2026, found Google leading shopping search starts at 56.68%, Amazon at 28.96%, and ChatGPT at 7.26%. Adtaxi's 36% and Smarty's 56.68% are not in conflict so much as measuring different things: one asks for a single preferred tool across a full channel menu, the other restricts the field to intent-driven starting points.

The AI half of the bundle carries its own complications for advertisers. Productrise research covering more than 100,000 identical shopping queries over 21 days in July 2026 found AI Mode returning roughly 95% fewer product listings than standard Google search, with an average of 4.3 listings per page against 22.5. A consumer who says search and AI is the preferred comparison tool may therefore be looking at a dramatically narrower shelf than the same query produced two years ago. Google's AI Overviews sit on the same trajectory, with Ahrefs research reported in February 2026 correlating the format with a 58% reduction in click-through rates for top-ranking pages.

Verification behaviour complicates the picture further. Reddit's Path to Purchase 2026 survey, published on June 22, 2026 and based on 13,956 United States adults and 6,485 United Kingdom adults surveyed by Attest in May 2026, found half of American shoppers checking AI recommendations on the platform before buying. RTB House research published in August 2026 found that AI lengthens purchase decisions for 42% of United States shoppers rather than shortening them. Price comparison rising to 49% and AI-assisted research becoming a stated preference are, on that evidence, the same behaviour rather than two.

Sentiment is negative but not collapsing

Adtaxi reports that 28% of respondents say their finances took a turn for the better while 38% say things have got worse. The ten-point negative gap is the survey's economic confidence measure, and it sits alongside the expectation that essential spending will keep climbing.

That reading is consistent with what the same fieldwork produced on the political side. When Adtaxi released the political cut of the research in June, 48.6% of respondents named the economy and inflation as the issues mattering most to them, healthcare came second at 17.2%, and only 12.9% expected above-average economic growth over the following year, a figure Adtaxi described as down by nearly a third year on year. Grocery prices ranked as the leading household concern at 23.6%.

It also sits within a longer run of measurement pointing the same direction. TransUnion's Q4 2025 Consumer Pulse Study, based on 3,000 adults surveyed in October 2025, found 42% of Americans planning to rely on credit cards for holiday purchases, up from 38% a year earlier, with 86% reporting some level of concern about tariff effects on household finances. InMarket's January 2026 survey of 4,844 adults found price inflation affecting Valentine's Day plans for 39% of consumers, with 39% of those adjusting choosing to dine at home rather than at a restaurant, a behaviour Adtaxi now measures at 42% across the general population.

Not every dataset agrees. Optimove Insights, surveying 648 United States consumers with household incomes of 75,000 dollars or more in Spring 2026, found 52% planning larger summer shopping budgets than the previous year. The sample restriction explains most of the divergence. Adtaxi surveyed a nationally spread adult population; Optimove surveyed an upper-income tier. Both can be accurate descriptions of a bifurcated market.

The neutrality number has run before

Among the four findings Adtaxi highlighted in its distribution, one has already been published. The release states that 42% of respondents prefer brands to remain neutral and focus on products and services in their messaging.

That figure appeared in June, reported as 42.4%, drawn from the same May 2026 SurveyMonkey fieldwork. The June release also carried the partisan breakdown that the August release omits: Democrats registered the highest support for brands taking public positions at 33%, while fewer than one fifth of Republicans and Independents backed brands doing so.

The repetition is not a contradiction, and it is not unusual practice. Research programmes commonly cut one fieldwork exercise into several releases timed to different news cycles. It is nonetheless a material fact for anyone treating the August publication as new evidence. The 2026 Consumer & Economy Survey and the 2026 Economic & Political Survey & Study share a sample, a platform, a fielding month, and at least one headline statistic. Trend-tracking that treats them as separate observations would double-count.

Methodology and disclosure gaps

Adtaxi states that the study was conducted using SurveyMonkey, launched in May 2026, and surveyed more than 1,100 United States adults nationwide. The company says it ensured acceptable response rates across all nine United States Census Divisions and across demographic ranges including gender, age, political party, and household income, and that responses were collected anonymously.

Several items are not disclosed. The release gives no fielding end date, no exact sample size beyond the "more than 1,100" floor, no margin of error, no weighting scheme, and no question wording for any item. It does not state whether the sample was drawn from SurveyMonkey's opt-in respondent pool or recruited separately, a distinction that governs how far the results generalise to the adult population. The comparison categories in the shopping-tool question are named but not defined.

Two further points on provenance. The pitch circulated to trade press on September 2, 2026 offered a link to the full survey and left the destination as an unfilled placeholder. An accompanying landing page pointed to a report file named for the 2609 campaign reference rather than the 2606 reference carried by the June political release, indicating a distinct publication rather than a reissue of the earlier document, though the underlying fieldwork is the same.

Adtaxi is a performance media agency that sells search, social, and programmatic advertising, founded in 2010. Research showing that search sits at the front of the purchase journey and that consumers reward practical value over positioning is consistent with what the company sells. That does not make the numbers wrong. It does mean the framing around them carries a commercial interest, in the same way that television trade bodies publish research favourable to television.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Three operational consequences follow from the data as published.

The first concerns category elasticity. Vacations and dining out at roughly 33% deferral, alongside 39% buying fewer discretionary items, describes demand contraction concentrated in exactly the categories that historically carry high advertising loads. Travel and restaurant advertisers are competing for a pool of intent that a third of the population has actively stepped out of, which raises effective acquisition costs before any auction dynamics are considered. AdRoll data reported in March 2026 already showed retargeting CPMs rising 18% year on year in January and February as budgets compressed toward lower-funnel placements.

The second concerns switching persistence. Forty per cent moving to lower-cost brands is a share-transfer number, and the marketing question it raises is retention rather than acquisition. Adobe research published in August 2026 found 72% of shoppers deleting a retail app after a single discount or purchase, with an average of ten retail apps per device and five unopened in the past month. Price-led acquisition during a value-seeking period produces customers whose attachment is to the price, and the app-deletion data suggests the churn is measurable at the surface level rather than merely theoretical.

The third concerns discovery surface economics. If 36% of consumers name search and AI as their preferred comparison tool at the same moment that AI-mediated results are returning 95% fewer product listings, the number of brands that can occupy the consideration set at the point of comparison is shrinking while stated reliance on that surface grows. That is a structural squeeze on visibility rather than a budgeting problem, and it lands hardest on the mid-tier brands that a price-comparing household would otherwise be evaluating against a market leader.

The 47% quality-for-price finding points in a related direction. A household comparing prices more often is also, on Adtaxi's evidence, applying a quality filter rather than sorting on cost alone. Whether that filter can operate inside a results surface displaying an average of 4.3 listings is an open question that the survey does not address, because it asks consumers what they prefer rather than measuring what the interface permits.

Adtaxi's own conclusion is that organisations understanding consumer financial mindset and responding with transparency, economic empathy, and tangible value will be positioned to strengthen relationships. That is the agency's reading. The measurable claims underneath it are the seven behaviour percentages, the 47% value definition, the 36% tool preference, the 28-against-38 confidence split, and a neutrality figure that has now been published twice from one sample.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Adtaxi, a digital marketing agency founded in 2010 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado, with research findings attributed to Murry Woronoff, Director of Research.

What: The 2026 Consumer & Economy Survey, reporting that 93% of respondents use at least one cost-saving behaviour, led by comparing prices at 49%, eating at home at 42%, switching to lower-cost brands at 40%, and buying fewer discretionary items at 39%. Value was defined as high quality for the price by 47%, 36% named search and AI as their preferred shopping comparison tool, 38% said their finances had worsened against 28% saying they improved, and 42% preferred brands to stay neutral in messaging.

When: Published on August 25, 2026, based on fieldwork launched in May 2026 and circulated to trade press on September 2, 2026.

Where: The United States, with responses collected across all nine United States Census Divisions.

Why: The findings quantify demand contraction concentrated in discretionary categories that carry high advertising loads, a 40% brand-switching rate that transfers share between named competitors, and a stated reliance on search and AI comparison tools at the same moment those surfaces are returning far fewer product listings. One headline statistic, the 42% brand neutrality figure, was already published in June from the same sample, which limits its value as an independent observation.