The effect of agent persona on source-clicking, reliance and trust in generative conversational search and the moderating role of health literacy

The utilisation of digital health information is increasingly prevalent, and generative AI-based health information search is likely to become commonplace as well. Yet generative conversation search still has the potential to disseminate inaccurate or incomplete information. Calibrating user reliance on, and trust in, system responses to be more appropriate may mitigate some harms following from this. Indeed, past research shows that clicking on sources in conversational search can improve appropriate reliance, although low source click-through rates remain a challenge. This research explores the design of search agent personas to increase source-clicking rates and foster appropriate reliance and trust. Further, we investigate how health literacy variance moderates the relationship between persona and source-clicking, trust and reliance. Our results show that persona design is a promising direction for influencing source page use frequency, and that health literacy interacts with persona design to affect verification behaviour and perceived risk. This work contributes to the development of more verifiable generative conversational search systems in healthcare contexts.