Content Marketing Statistics 2026: AI, Budgets and AI Search

Out of 301 marketers in Ahrefs’ latest survey, 93% use AI to create or help create content, up from 87% a year earlier. Only 13.9% of content marketers in Orbit Media’s survey say their blog delivers strong results, an all-time low. Content marketing statistics now show a split between output, which AI has sped up, and results, which have not followed.

Surveyed CMOs’ marketing budgets rose only slightly to 7.8% of company revenue in 2026 from 7.7% in 2025, according to Gartner. Distribution is shifting too: AI Overviews appeared in 82.91% of US desktop search results for branded keywords as of September 29, 2026, per Ahrefs. The figures below cover AI adoption, budgets, blogging benchmarks, AI search and video, each tied to the survey that produced it.

Key Takeaways

• Content marketers reporting strong blog results fell from 26% in 2022 to 14%, per Orbit Media. Over the same period, the average content marketer spent 50 fewer hours writing.
• 9 in 10 marketers already use AI to produce content, but fewer than 4 in 10 say it has improved performance, according to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) survey of business-to-business (B2B) marketers.
• US Google users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits to pages with an AI summary, against 15% of visits without one, in March 2025, per Pew Research Center.
• 45% of marketers named AI-powered marketing tools among their top three areas for increased investment in 2026, while human resources ranked last at 9%, in CMI’s B2B survey.
• Nearly 25% of content marketers say large language models (LLMs) are the primary audience for a majority of their content, rising to 32% among enterprise organizations.
• 69% of Ahrefs respondents publish a larger share of AI content than a year ago, yet just 2.7% trust AI-generated content with no review at all.

Editor’s Choice

• Marketers using AI to create content: 93% of Ahrefs respondents.
• Marketing budgets as a share of revenue: 7.8% in 2026.
• Share of marketing budgets going to AI: 15.3% on average.
• Content marketers planning to raise budgets: 87% in 2026.
• Businesses using video as a marketing tool: 91%.
• Branded AI Overviews in position one: 76.2%.

Content Marketing Benchmarks at a Glance

• 280 of 301 Ahrefs respondents reported using AI to create or help create content, or 93%, up from 87% in the previous survey.
• The average blog post runs 1,312 words, down from a peak of 1,427 in 2023, and takes 3 hours, 20 minutes to write, per Orbit Media.
• Gartner puts marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, based on a survey of 401 CMOs and other marketing leaders.
• 87% of content marketers plan to increase content marketing budgets in 2026, according to Clutch and Conductor.

Source: Ahrefs 2026, Orbit Media 2026, Gartner 2026, Clutch and Conductor 2026, Wyzowl 2026

How many marketers use AI for content?

Ahrefs found that 280 of 301 respondents, or 93%, use AI to create or help create content, up from 87% in its previous survey. Orbit Media puts AI use for blogging at 92.4%. Two separate samples landing within a point of each other suggests AI use in content work is close to universal among surveyed marketers.

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About This Data

Figures here come from 10 sources: 1 analyst firm survey, 1 nonprofit research center study and 8 marketing industry surveys and studies. Sources date from July 2025 to October 2026. Only publishers that ran their own survey, crawl or browsing panel qualify, and figures are reviewed as new editions appear.

How Marketers Use AI in Content Creation

• 85% of marketers using AI say they produce content faster since adopting it, with 47.9% much quicker and 37.1% slightly quicker.
• Just 2.5% say AI has slowed down their content production, per Ahrefs.
• Using AI for data analysis rose from 28% to 60% of marketers who use AI, the largest percentage-point gain in the chart below.
• 75% of content marketers already use AI-powered tools as part of their standard content creation workflow, according to Clutch and Conductor.
• Data collected by Adobe shows 53% of senior executives using generative AI report significant improvements in team efficiency. Adobe also reports that 67% expect AI to enable more personalised experiences, a figure the page gives without a respondent group.

Recent Developments

• October 29, 2026: Ahrefs found that 50 to 83% of AI citations are gone the next day, but about 75% of those come back within 20 days.
• October 2, 2026: Ahrefs reported that 73.3% of branded keywords triggered AI Overviews in September 2026 as a monthly average, up from 61.3% in July.
• September 30, 2026: Ahrefs’ survey showed the share of marketers using AI to check AI-assisted content doubled from 14% in 2025 to 28.6% in 2026.
• September 30, 2026: 63 of the 100 brand-name queries Ahrefs tracked had an AI Overview, against five among 98 usable results at the first checkpoint.
• September 8, 2026: Orbit Media reported that 18% of content marketers do not know if their blog delivers results, a figure that had always fallen between 9% and 14% for a decade.

Most-Used AI Tools for Content Marketing

• Among respondents who use AI, 83% use Claude, the most-used tool in Ahrefs’ survey.
• 76% use ChatGPT and 58% use Gemini, so the Claude vs ChatGPT gap among these marketers is 7 percentage points.
• Claude was chosen by 83.2% of AI users, followed by ChatGPT at 75.7% and Gemini at 57.9%, in the survey’s unrounded figures.

AI Content Quality and Human Review

• Two-thirds (66%) of marketers trust AI-generated content only if a human reviews it first, and just 2.7% trust it with no review at all.
• 69% of respondents publish a larger share of AI content than a year ago, rising to 74% among AI users.
• Fewer than 4 in 10 marketers say AI has actually improved performance, as productivity rises but creativity and quality often lag, per CMI’s B2B survey.

Source: Ahrefs AI content survey 2026

Blogging Performance Benchmarks

• 13.9% of content marketers say their blog delivers strong results, an all-time low, after years in which between 20% and 30% said so.
• The average content marketer now spends 50 fewer hours writing than in 2022, at 57 posts per year and 50 minutes faster per post.
• 92% of marketers use AI and 8% do not, and both groups are equally likely to report strong results, per Orbit Media.
• 18% do not know if their blog delivers results.

Source: Orbit Media blogging survey 2026

Key finding: Orbit Media found that none of the AI use cases in its survey correlate with performance, while strong results fell from 26% to 14% since 2022. Speed was the measurable gain from AI, so teams judging AI by output volume are tracking the one metric that improved while the result metric slid.

Are companies getting better ROI from AI-driven content?

Orbit Media found marketers who use AI are no more likely to report strong results than those who do not. Among B2B marketers, CMI reports that 9 in 10 marketers use AI for content, but fewer than 4 in 10 say it improved performance. Neither survey shows a clear return gap in favour of AI-driven programs yet.

Marketing Budget Statistics

• Marketing budgets rose only slightly to 7.8% of company revenue in 2026 from 7.7% in 2025, according to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey.
• AI-ready marketing organizations allocate 21.3% of their marketing budgets to AI initiatives, the highest share in the chart below.
• 70% of chief marketing officers (CMOs) say becoming an AI leader is a critical goal for 2026, but only 30% report mature AI readiness capabilities.
• 56% of CMOs say their marketing organization lacks the budget required to deliver their 2026 strategy.
• Gartner surveyed 401 CMOs and other marketing leaders in North America, the United Kingdom and Europe from January through March 2026, most at companies with annual revenue of over $1 billion.

Source: Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2026

Content Marketing Investment Priorities

• 45% of marketers named AI-powered marketing tools among the top three areas where they expect to increase investment in 2026, in CMI’s B2B survey.
• Investment in human resources, covering salaries, training and development, ranked last at 9%.
• 87% of content marketers plan to increase content marketing budgets in 2026, and more than 55% expect to increase content output.
• Proprietary research and original reports rank as the top written content priority for increasing visibility in AI-generated answers, per Clutch and Conductor.

Source: Clutch and Conductor 2026, CMI 2025, Gartner 2026

Why it matters: Gartner found 56% of CMOs lack the budget to deliver their 2026 strategy and 54% report insufficient resources. With Gartner’s CMOs reporting flat budgets, new spending on AI tools may have to come from existing lines, and CMI’s respondents rank human resources last.

AI Overviews on Branded and Non-Branded Searches

• AI Overviews appeared in 82.91% of US desktop search results for branded keywords as of September 29, 2026.
• Ahrefs analyzed 232.8 million US desktop Google search-result crawls from July to September 2026.
• Branded keywords with an AI Overview posted a 12-percentage-point increase between July 2026 and September 2026, roughly 20% growth relative to the July 2026 rate.
• Non-branded searches rose by 4.8 percentage points over the same period, reaching 78.3% in September 2026.

Which Sites AI Overviews Cite for Brand Searches

• 63 of the 100 brand-name queries Ahrefs tracked had an AI Overview at the last check, against five among 98 usable results at the first checkpoint, in a panel that ran from July 1, 2026 to September 30, 2026.
• 48 of those 63 AI Overviews appeared in position one, or 76.2%, with an average position of 1.49.
• In Ahrefs’ 100-brand panel, Wikipedia was cited in 41 branded AI Overviews, a 71.9% share, ahead of YouTube at 22 (38.6%).

By the numbers: Of the 63 branded AI Overviews in Ahrefs’ panel, 48 sat in position one, a 76.2% share with an average position of 1.49. For a brand query, the first thing a searcher reads is now often a summary built partly from Wikipedia, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Click-Through Rates When AI Summaries Appear

• Users who encountered an AI summary clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits, against 15% for users who did not see one, per Pew Research Center.
• The analysis used browsing data from 900 US adults collected during March 1-31, 2025, so it predates the latest AI Overview expansion.

Do AI Overviews reduce clicks to websites?

Pew Research Center found US Google search users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits to pages with an AI summary in March 2025, against 15% on pages without one, and clicked a link inside the summary in just 1% of visits. Fewer clicks per search means content has to earn a citation inside the summary as well as a ranking beneath it.

AI Citation Stability Statistics

• 50 to 83% of AI citations are gone the next day, but about 75% of those come back within 20 days, per Ahrefs.
• Ahrefs advises counting how many of the last seven days a brand was cited, instead of judging visibility from one check.

Source: Ahrefs AI citation study, October 2026

Content Marketers’ Views on LLMs and AI Search

• 81% of content marketers feel positive about the state of content marketing in the era of LLMs, according to Clutch and Conductor.
• Nearly 25% say LLMs are now the primary audience for a majority of their content, rising to 32% among enterprise organizations.
• The findings come from a January 2026 survey of more than 450 marketing professionals responsible for producing content.

Video Content Marketing Statistics

• 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and 93% of video marketers say it is an important part of their strategy, according to Wyzowl.
• 63% of video marketers have used AI to create or edit video, up from 51%.
• 96% of people have watched an explainer video to learn about a product or service, and 85% have been convinced to buy by watching a video.
• Wyzowl surveyed 266 unique respondents, both marketers and online consumers, in late 2025.

Personalization and Thought Leadership Statistics

• 89% of marketers say their organizations personalize content, but they do not go far with it, according to CMI’s B2B research.
• 96% say their organization creates thought leadership content, but in many companies fewer than 5% of employees contribute.
• CMI surveyed more than 1,000 marketers with MarketingProfs, all working in B2B.

Source: Content Marketing Institute B2B research, October 2025

Conclusion

93% of Ahrefs respondents use AI to create content, yet only 13.9% of content marketers in Orbit Media’s survey report strong blog results. The data points to a field that has automated production faster than it has learned to measure, with flat budgets and AI summaries both pressing on the click that content used to earn. The next editions of these surveys will show whether teams that publish less, invest in original research and track AI citations rather than raw output can reverse the slide in reported results.