For the second consecutive year, a comprehensive industry survey tracking the intersection of artificial intelligence and content marketing has revealed a landscape transformed. The latest research, which polled 301 marketing professionals, offers a detailed look into how AI has woven itself into the daily workflows of modern content teams, shaping everything from productivity metrics and tooling preferences to underlying industry attitudes.
While generative AI was once viewed as an experimental novelty or a passing tech trend, the new data confirms it has firmly entrenched itself as standard operating procedure across the marketing sector.
93% of Respondents Are Using AI to Help Create Content
The most striking revelation from the survey is the sheer scale of adoption. Out of 301 total respondents, 280—or 93%—reported using artificial intelligence to create or help create content. This marks a notable climb from the 87% recorded in the previous year’s survey.
Conversely, the minority who abstain from AI altogether remains exceptionally small, sitting at just under 7%. Among those non-users, nearly all cited accuracy as a primary concern, with more than half expressing a general distrust of AI-generated outputs.
Industry observers note that this widespread embrace is hardly surprising. As Ryan Law of Ahrefs previously pointed out, ubiquitous legacy software platforms—ranging from Gmail and Google Docs to Slack—have rapidly integrated AI capabilities into their core functionality, making the technology virtually impossible to avoid. This normalization has been accelerated by the explosive growth of consumer-facing AI giants. OpenAI reported reaching 800 million weekly active users by October 2025, climbing to 900 million by February 2026, and eventually surpassing the 1-billion-user milestone by the end of July that same year.
This ambient integration has forced a philosophical shift across the industry. As Mateusz Makosiewicz, marketing researcher and educator at Ahrefs, observes, the technology can no longer be uninvented.
"You can’t put AI back in the bottle," Makosiewicz notes. "At this point, AI is simply part of how content gets made, much like robots help humans build cars. And once your competitors are using it to publish more and move faster, refusing to use it isn’t necessarily taking the high road. It may just mean falling behind. It’s Cold War logic: once one side escalates, everyone else has to keep up or lose ground. And even the brands that adopt AI aren’t necessarily pulling ahead. They’re running faster just to stay in the same place."
61% Say Their View of AI-Generated Content Has Become More Positive
Along with rising adoption rates, industry sentiment is shifting in a favorable direction. More than half of all survey respondents indicated that their overall perception of AI-generated content has improved over the past year. Specifically, 38% reported feeling somewhat more positive, while 23% described their shift as much more positive.
While precise psychological triggers for this sentiment swing were not explicitly mapped out, researchers believe a combination of rapidly maturing model capabilities, refined operational efficiencies, and the development of sophisticated internal workflows have driven the change. For instance, structured operational approaches—such as the multi-step skill-file processes utilized by content engineering teams—have demonstrated how structured inputs yield vastly superior and more reliable outputs. The widespread sharing of these methodologies across professional communities has empowered practitioners to elevate the baseline quality of their AI-assisted work.
AI Is Helping Marketers Produce Content Faster
When it comes to operational impact, speed has emerged as the defining advantage. Approximately 85% of marketers utilizing AI reported that they are producing content at a quicker pace since adopting the technology. Nearly half—47.9%—stated they are moving much quicker, while 37.1% noted a slight increase in speed. Only a meager 2.5% felt that AI had actually slowed down their production pipelines.
This emphasis on velocity follows last year’s findings, which showed that AI-adopting organizations published roughly 42% more content than their non-using counterparts. However, the sheer acceleration has prompted nuanced internal debates among veteran practitioners.
Ryan Law, who has spent nearly 14 years creating thousands of pieces of content, acknowledges that AI acts as a powerful accelerator even for seasoned professionals, though quality control still demands substantial human investment. He notes that individual pieces routinely require four to six hours or more of dedicated human refinement.
At the same time, caution surrounds the headlong rush toward maximum output. Si Quan Ong, an SEO and marketing educator at Ahrefs, points out that speed alone is not an unalloyed good.
"I agree that AI helps produce content faster. But I don’t see it necessarily as a good thing," Ong explains. "Firstly, AI makes content faster because it can generate a full blog post in a matter of minutes. But it reads so correct that it’s impossible to edit. Before you’ve even questioned the big things in the post, you’d find yourself making small edits on prose, and likely publishing as it is. Also, faster means nothing if there’s no strategy or serious thought behind it. It just smells factory. I hope marketers are using AI to make better things faster, not just make things faster."
AI Use Is Growing Fastest for Specialized Tasks Like Data Analysis and Keyword Clustering
While initial waves of generative AI adoption focused heavily on rudimentary text drafting, this year’s data highlights a significant pivot toward specialized, analytical tasks.
Among surveyed marketers, the most dramatic year-over-year increases occurred in technical workflows. The utilization of AI for data analysis surged from 28% to 60%. Similarly, image creation jumped from 19% to 43%, and keyword clustering climbed from 23% to 45%. Notably, these specific applications ranked among the least popular use cases in the previous year’s study, indicating that professionals are discovering the value of AI far beyond basic copywriting.
Claude Is the Most-Used AI Tool Among Respondents
In the tooling arena, preferences have evolved significantly. Among respondents who incorporate AI into their routines, 83% reported using Anthropic’s Claude, making it the most popular platform in the survey. OpenAI’s ChatGPT followed closely at 76%, with Google’s Gemini capturing 58% of users. Specialized development and workspace extensions also registered meaningful shares, including Claude Cowork at 42%, Claude Code at 37%, and Codex at 13%.
The prominence of Claude aligns closely with feature rollouts that introduced reproducible process files, allowing users to establish standardized workflows effortlessly. Survey data supports this observation: 68% of AI-using respondents reported utilizing structured skill files, with over half creating custom configurations of their own.
Only 2.7% of Marketers Trust AI-Generated Content Without Any Human Review
Despite high confidence in operational tools, blind trust in raw machine output remains virtually non-existent. Two-thirds of marketers—66%—indicated they will only trust AI-generated content if a human reviews it first. An elite cohort of just 2.7% are willing to trust unedited AI outputs completely.
Distrust among active users is remarkably low, with only 6% expressing general skepticism. By contrast, more than half of non-users harbor foundational doubts about the technology’s reliability.
69% of Marketers Say the Share of AI Content They Publish Grew in the Past Year
Volume metrics continue to point upward. Across the entire survey base, 69% of respondents reported that the share of AI-assisted content in their publishing mix grew over the past year. Among active AI users, that figure climbs to 74%.
Crucially, industry leaders emphasize that rising AI volumes do not equate to unedited, automated publishing pipelines. Even among respondents who stated that zero percent of their published output consists of pure, unedited AI text, more than half still reported an increase in their overall reliance on AI assistance for research, structuring, and drafting.
Garrett Sussman, Director of Marketing at iPullRank, views this cooperative model as a healthy maturation of the industry. "Listen, AI is a tool, not a disenfranchising dystopia," Sussman says. "As brands put mature and responsible governance models in place, it makes sense that we’d see more publishing. AI speeds production so humans can own strategy, taste, originality, and QA. Don’t sleep on pervasive human-led, AI-powered content."
Most Respondents Say Human Writing Still Beats Their AI Content
Even as algorithms grow more sophisticated, human authorship retains its crown for quality. Over half of AI users—56%—maintain that human-written content outperforms AI-generated material, with an additional 23% rating human writing as "way better."
Perceptions of quality, however, vary dramatically depending on organizational role. Nearly half of founders and business owners surveyed believe their AI-generated content matches or surpasses human writing. In stark contrast, only 17% of junior and mid-level marketing professionals share that optimistic assessment.
Experienced content creators argue that while machines excel at mechanical tasks, they struggle with genuine voice. Louise Linehan, a content marketer at Ahrefs, notes that AI handles fundamental structural needs efficiently—such as compiling a clear page FAQ—but warns against surrendering creative messaging.
"We’re not handing it content that needs personality, like our homepage messaging or our annual engagement report," Linehan explains. "That would be the fastest way for our brand to lose its edge and start sounding like every other content platform."
Twice as Many Marketers Now Use AI to Check AI Content
As reliance on machine-generated drafts expands, validation methods are shifting in tandem. Nearly 29% of marketers now employ AI tools to audit and check the quality of other AI-generated outputs, representing a doubling from 14% in the previous year.
Despite this automation, manual self-checking remains the predominant method for ensuring quality, while the percentage of teams conducting no review at all has shrunk even further.
Many experienced practitioners urge caution regarding automated quality loops. Linehan points out that relying on AI to review AI can create dangerous blind spots, invoking the psychological phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.
"You don’t know what you don’t know, and if you have a knowledge gap, you’re not going to notice when an AI hallucinates or gets things wrong," Linehan warns. "In the end, I spent more time fact-checking the output and doing the deeper research that I’d tried to skip at the beginning, than I would have if I’d done it all myself from the start."
41% of Respondents Aren’t Saving Money on Writers with AI
Financial impact remains mixed. Nearly half of surveyed marketers reported that adopting AI has not reduced their spending on external writers or freelance contributors, while 26% were uncertain whether any cost savings had materialized.
This dynamic is largely explained by team structures: only 28% of survey respondents regularly work with outside writers, with the vast majority producing content through internal teams or solo efforts. For the minority who did report tangible budget reductions, typical savings averaged between $1,001 and $2,000 per month.
Only 22% of Respondents Disclose AI Use, But That’s an Increase from Last Year
Transparency with audiences remains the exception rather than the rule. Roughly 78% of marketers utilizing AI do not explicitly inform website visitors that automated tools assisted in creating their published materials. However, open disclosure is slowly gaining ground, rising from 16% in the 2025 survey to 22% in the latest data.
Researchers suggest that variance in disclosure rates largely stems from differing definitions of "AI content." Utilizing an algorithm to check statistical data or refine an article outline differs fundamentally from publishing unedited, machine-written prose. Intriguingly, brands that publish higher volumes of pure AI content showed no statistical inclination toward higher rates of public disclosure.
7% of Respondents Publish Primarily "Pure" AI Content
At the outer edge of the publishing spectrum, a small group of marketers rely entirely on automation. Seven percent of AI users reported that more than 75% of their published output consists of pure, unedited AI content, up slightly from 4% the prior year. Meanwhile, the proportion of marketers publishing zero pure AI content declined from 50% to 40%, cementing the reality that hybrid human-AI workflows have become the foundational standard for the modern content marketing industry.
