Brands rate UGC ‘7.3/10’ within their strategy | UGC Study 2026

I’m Miguel, co-founder of HICARI, and for months I’ve been seeing the same pattern over and over again in conversations with brands: they ask for UGC, use it, get results from it… and yet they still talk about it as if it were an extra, something to try “to see how it goes”, not a central part of their strategy.

So we decided to stop relying on intuition and get the real data.

We combined two things: the real platform data from 2026 so far (1,012 requests handled, more than 500 active brands generating content) and a survey of marketing decision-makers at brands such as MasterD, Iberdrola, Flexicar and Impress… The I UGC Study Spain is here, and one finding keeps recurring in almost everything we found: brands are behind their own results.

Here’s what surprised us most.

When you ask a brand how much importance it gives UGC within its digital strategy, it gives you a 6.53 out of 10. A barely passing grade, basically. But when you ask how it has actually performed, the score rises to 7.32. A solid B.

That’s not normal. In marketing, the usual pattern is precisely the opposite: expectations run ahead of what is ultimately delivered. Here, it’s the other way around: UGC is performing better than brands themselves think it deserves to. Those already using it can see it in the numbers. Those that aren’t still think it’s “just another channel”.

And I’m not just saying that—we see it on the platform every week:

• +500 brands currently generating UGC content with us
• 1,012 requests handled in just over half of 2026
• +7,000 creators registered
• And yet, 72% of brands spend less than €1,000 per month on UGC, meaning most are still playing it safe and haven’t gone all-in on it

That last figure is the one I like most, because it means the ceiling is still a long way off.

Looking at results by channel, one pattern appears consistently in both paid and organic: UGC grabs attention before it converts.

In paid campaigns, what most brands notice is that it improves CTR, even before conversion or ROAS. The same happens organically: reach is the first thing to rise, not engagement. It makes sense when you think about it: a video made by a creator looks like real content in the feed, not advertising. And that first click, that first pause in the scroll, is the most expensive thing to achieve in any strategy.

We asked brands what their biggest headache with UGC is, and price doesn’t even make the top list. 79% say their challenge is content quality or finding the right creator, and in reality they’re the same thing: if you pair a creator with your brand poorly, the result almost never turns out well, no matter how cheap it was.

And here’s another figure that confirms what we already suspected: what brands value most in a creator (95% say this) is how they communicate, not their profile or how much they charge. They’re not buying an influencer; they’re buying someone who knows how to tell a story well.

With all the talk about AI-generated video, we had to ask. And the answer was crystal clear: no brand believes AI will replace human creators. 68% think they will coexist within the same strategy, rather than fight over the same budget. We think the same, which is why at HICARI we don’t see AI as competition for UGC, but as another tool alongside it.

UGC in Spain already has the scale, volume and results of a serious channel. What it lacks isn’t demand or available budget; it’s for brands to fully believe, within their own strategy, what their own numbers are already telling them.

If you want to dive into the details, with all the data, charts and breakdowns by price, category and channel, here’s the full study: