129 Blogging Statistics October 2026

Blogging statistics for 2026 show two trends running in opposite directions. Publishing is cheap and constant: WordPress.com users alone put out about 70 million new posts a month (Automattic, WordPress.com activity, Sep 2026). Getting those posts read is the hard part. Google answers more questions on the results page, and AI assistants summarise blogs without sending the reader over.

Every number below comes from the organisation that ran the study, survey or count, with the date of the data. Where the only available source was a roundup that repeated someone else's figure, we traced it to the origin or left it out. Several widely shared stats did not survive that check, including the 2009-era claims that companies that blog get more leads.

This page covers blogs as a publishing channel: output, length, readership, traffic, formats, AI and income. Budgets, team size and strategy for wider content programmes are on our content marketing statistics page, and the search side sits under SEO statistics.

Is blogging still worth it in 2026?

Yes, for writers who treat search clicks as a bonus rather than the business model. Search still sends blogs far more readers than AI tools do. But Google keeps more of each search on its own page, and attention that used to land on blogs is moving to video, forums and AI chat.

How many Google searches still send a click?

Fewer every year. The zero-click share rose from about 45% a decade ago to 60.45% of US searches in 2024 (SparkToro, Jun 2026).

• Users clicked a link inside Google's AI summary in only 1% of visits to pages that showed one (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
• People ended their browsing session on 26% of result pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages without one (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
• 60% of searches starting with who, what, when or why produced an AI summary, the question format most how-to posts target (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
• Across all searches in the March 2025 sample, 18% generated an AI summary (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
• In Seer Interactive's tracking, question-format informational queries triggered an AI Overview 85.9% of the time (Seer Interactive, Apr 2026).
• Organic CTR on queries with an AI Overview recovered from 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026 (Seer Interactive, Apr 2026).
• Google says total organic click volume from Search to websites has been "relatively stable" year over year, with slightly more quality clicks (Google, Aug 2025).

Where are readers going instead of blogs?

To video, social feeds, forums and creators, mostly alongside text rather than instead of it. AI chat is growing too, but it sends almost no one back.

• Social media and video networks became the most used source of news globally for the first time, at 54% of people across 48 markets (Reuters Institute, Jun 2026).
• Use of news organisations' websites and apps for news fell to 51% (Reuters Institute, Jun 2026).
• 46% of people get some news from creators of any type (Reuters Institute, Jun 2026).
• Weekly use of AI chatbots for news rose from 7% to 10% (Reuters Institute, Jun 2026).
• 84% of US adults use YouTube, the most widely used platform in the country (Pew Research Center, Nov 2025).
• 26% of US adults use Reddit, up from 18% four years earlier (Pew Research Center, Nov 2025).
• Reddit's daily active uniques grew 18% year over year to 130.3 million (Reddit, Jul 2026).
• Reddit's weekly active uniques passed half a billion, at 514.6 million (Reddit, Jul 2026).

The crawl data shows why AI chat sends so few readers. AI crawlers read far more pages than they send visitors to, and the gap is widest for the chat assistants. Our AI search statistics page has the full breakdown.

• Anthropic's crawl-to-refer ratio ran between about 25,000:1 and 100,000:1 from mid-2025, and OpenAI's peaked at 3,700:1 in March 2025 (Cloudflare, Dec 2025).
• Google's own crawl-to-refer ratio started 2025 just over 3:1 and peaked at about 30:1 in April (Cloudflare, Dec 2025).
• AI-referred visits made up 0.2% of traffic across 6,500+ websites (Contentsquare, Feb 2026).

How much do bloggers write?

Blog platforms still publish at huge volume, and each blogger puts less into every post. The long-form arms race of 2014 to 2022 is over.

How many blogs and blog posts are there?

There is no reliable count of every blog on the internet, so treat any single "number of blogs" figure as a guess. The numbers worth using come from platforms counting their own users and from surveys of the software websites run on.

WordPress runs four in ten websites, and nearly six in ten of those whose CMS can be identified.

• WordPress holds a 58.7% share among websites with a known content management system (W3Techs, Sep 2026).
• WordPress ran 23.3% of all websites in January 2015 and peaked at 43.6% in January 2025 (W3Techs, Sep 2026).
• Wix runs 4.2% of all websites and Squarespace 2.4% (W3Techs, Sep 2026).

Blog platforms each count their own users in their own way, so compare figures within a platform rather than across them.

• WordPress.com users write about 77 million new comments a month (Automattic, WordPress.com activity, Sep 2026).
• More than 409 million people view over 20 billion pages a month across WordPress.com and Jetpack sites (Automattic, WordPress.com activity, Sep 2026).
• 71% of WordPress.com blogs are written in English, followed by Spanish at 4.7% (Automattic, WordPress.com activity, Sep 2026).
• Over 100 million people use Medium every month (Medium, Sep 2026).
• Medium is funded by more than a million paying members rather than ads (Medium, Sep 2026).
• Substack reports tens of millions of active subscribers and more than 5 million paid subscriptions (Substack, Jun 2025).

How much work goes into a typical blog post?

Posts are getting shorter and faster to write, and bloggers publish less often than they did a decade ago.

A typical post is about 1,300 words. The average runs 1,312 words, down from a peak of 1,427 in 2023 (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).

• The average post in 2014 was 808 words (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).
• Posts of 3,000+ words get 138% more page views than posts under 500 words (Semrush, Sep 2022).
• On Medium, posts that take about 7 minutes to read capture the most total reading time (Medium Data Lab, Dec 2013).

Writing one takes just over three hours. The average is 3 hours 20 minutes, down from a peak of 4 hours 10 minutes in 2022 (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).

• In 2014 the average post took 2 hours 24 minutes (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).
• The average content marketer now spends about 50 fewer hours a year writing than in 2022, at 57 posts a year and 50 minutes saved per post (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).
• 20% of bloggers who spend more than 6 hours on a post report strong results, against 9% of those who spend under an hour (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).

Publishing has slowed with it. Only 13% publish two to six posts a week, down from 28% in 2014 (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).

• 19% publish monthly, up from 9% in 2014 (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).

Do people actually read blog posts?

They scan. Most visitors read the top of a post, take what they need and leave, which puts most of the work on the opening screen.

How much of a blog post do readers read?

Not much. Each extra 100 words on a page adds only 4.4 seconds of visit time, enough to read about 18% of the added text (Nielsen Norman Group, May 2008).

• Users spent 57% of their page-viewing time above the fold (Nielsen Norman Group, Apr 2018).
• 74% of viewing time went to the first two screenfuls of content (Nielsen Norman Group, Apr 2018).
• On general websites, more than 42% of viewing time fell within the top 20% of the page (Nielsen Norman Group, Apr 2018).
• Visitors often leave a page within 10 to 20 seconds unless the value is clear straight away (Nielsen Norman Group, Sep 2011).

Time on websites is shrinking as well. Across 99 billion sessions, engagement (pages viewed, scroll rate and time on site) fell 10% year over year (Contentsquare, Feb 2026).

• Visits fell 3.8% year over year (Contentsquare, Feb 2026).
• 13% of visitors return within 30 days of their first visit (Contentsquare, Feb 2026).

Who still reads long-form expertise?

B2B buyers. 64% of target decision-makers spend more than an hour a week reading and viewing thought leadership (Edelman and LinkedIn, Jul 2025).

• 55% of hidden decision-makers use thought leadership to vet potential vendors (Edelman and LinkedIn, Jul 2025).
• 71% of hidden decision-makers say thought leadership shows a vendor's value better than conventional marketing or sales material (Edelman and LinkedIn, Jul 2025).
• 96% of B2B marketers say their organisation creates thought leadership content (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• 37% say fewer than 5% of their employees with specialist knowledge contribute to it (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• B2B marketers rate LinkedIn (76%) and email newsletters (54%) as the most effective channels for thought leadership (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).

Which blog formats get read and shared most?

Infographics and webinars in Orbit's data, lists and "why" posts in studies of shares and links. The most common format, the how-to, is one of the weakest. 68% of bloggers publish how-to articles, and 15% of them report strong results (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).

• Fewer bloggers publish infographics (21%), but 23% of those who do get strong results (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).
• List posts are twice as common at 42%, and 16% of the bloggers who publish them report strong results (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).
• List posts get 218% more social shares than how-to posts (Backlinko, Feb 2019).
• 1.3% of articles generate 75% of all social shares (Backlinko, Feb 2019).

Headlines help when they are long and ask a clear question. Headlines of 14 to 17 words get 76.7% more social shares than short ones (Backlinko, Feb 2019).

• Headlines that end with a question mark get 23.3% more shares (Backlinko, Feb 2019).
• Title tags of 40 to 60 characters have a 33.3% higher click-through rate than titles outside that range (Backlinko, Aug 2019).
• Titles with positive sentiment lift CTR by about 4% (Backlinko, Aug 2019).

Visuals help up to a point. Bloggers who add four to six visuals to a typical post are the most likely to report strong results, at 21% (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).

• 38% of bloggers add a single visual to a typical post, up from 25% in 2019 (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).
• On a product listing page, users spent 18% of their viewing time on photos and 82% on text, so images support the copy rather than replace it (Nielsen Norman Group, Nov 2010).

Where does blog traffic come from?

Most posts never get a single search visitor. The few that do rank tend to keep earning traffic for years, which makes an old post that ranks worth more than a new one that doesn't.

How many blog posts get search traffic?

A small minority. Beyond the pages with no Google traffic at all, another 1.94% get between one and ten visits a month (Ahrefs, Dec 2023).

• Only 1.74% of newly published pages reach Google's top 10 within a year, down from 5.7% in 2017 (Ahrefs, May 2025).
• Counting only non-empty English pages created in October 2023, 6.11% reached the top 10 within a year (Ahrefs, May 2025).
• 40.82% of pages that reached the top 10 did so within a month of publishing (Ahrefs, May 2025).
• 72.9% of pages in Google's top 10 are more than three years old, up from 59% in 2017 (Ahrefs, May 2025).
• The average page ranking #1 on Google is five years old (Ahrefs, May 2025).

What keeps a blog post earning traffic over time?

Rankings that compound and, far more rarely, links. Old posts that already rank keep producing leads, while most posts never earn a single link.

92% of HubSpot's monthly blog leads came from posts published before that month (HubSpot, Jun 2025).

• 46% of HubSpot's monthly blog leads came from only 30 posts (HubSpot, Jun 2025).
• Updating and republishing old posts raised their monthly organic search views by an average of 106% (HubSpot, Jun 2025).
• The share of bloggers who update older articles peaked at 73% during 2020 to 2022 (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).

Links are the missing piece for most posts. 94% of 912 million blog posts had no external links (Backlinko, Feb 2019).

• Posts over 3,000 words earned 77.2% more referring domain links than posts under 1,000 words (Backlinko, Feb 2019).
• In an earlier Moz and BuzzSumo sample of 100,000 posts, over 75% had no external links (Moz, Sep 2015).

Our link building statistics page goes deeper on links.

Which promotion channels do bloggers rely on?

The cheap ones, which work least. 89% promote posts on social media, but only 14% of them report strong results (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).

The channels that take more effort are used less and pay off more often.

Keyword research is slipping too. 23% of bloggers never research keywords, now more than the 18% who always do (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).

For the email channel itself, see our email marketing statistics.

Does business blogging pay off?

For a shrinking minority. Blogs still pay off for businesses that do the expensive work, such as original research, expert collaboration and editing. Those are the parts teams are cutting.

How many marketers see results from their blog?

Few, and many can't tell. 18.9% of content marketers say they don't know whether their blog delivers results, an all-time high (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).

• Marketers who use six or more of the eight practices Orbit tracks are nearly three times as likely to report strong results (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).
• None of the 1,042 respondents use all eight practices (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).
• Guest blogging fell 29% in a year, although guest bloggers are 1.4 times as likely to report strong results (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).

Blogs rank below video on ROI and still near the top on investment. 22.3% of marketers rank blog posts among their highest-ROI formats, against 48.6% for short-form video (HubSpot, Apr 2026).

• 35.4% of marketers plan to increase investment in their website, blog and SEO (HubSpot, Apr 2026).

Can a blog make money from ads?

Yes, if the blog already has an audience. Ad networks set traffic or revenue floors, and those floors are coming down.

Raptive's previous minimum was 100,000 monthly pageviews (Raptive, Oct 2025).

• Mediavine requires sites to generate at least $5,000 in annual ad revenue (Mediavine, Aug 2026).
• Journey by Mediavine accepts sites with at least 1,000 sessions from Tier 1 countries in 30 days (Mediavine, Aug 2026).
• AdSense for Content publishers receive 80% of ad revenue after the advertiser platform's fee, or about 68% when advertisers buy through Google Ads (Google AdSense Help, Sep 2026).

How many writers earn a living from blogging?

Few. Subscriptions depend on readers who trust one writer, and most creators never earn a full-time income from it.

Ghost is the one subscription platform in these sources that publishes a total payout figure.

• Total publisher earnings on Ghost have passed $100 million (Ghost, Aug 2025).
• Ghost's own annual revenue is over $8.5 million (Ghost, Aug 2025).

About one creator in twenty-five earns a living. Only about 4% of the world's 50 million creators earn more than $100,000 a year (Goldman Sachs, Apr 2023).

• Goldman Sachs expects the creator economy to grow from $250 billion to $480 billion by 2027 (Goldman Sachs, Apr 2023).
• Employment of US writers and authors is projected to show little or no change from 2025 to 2035, with about 11,900 openings a year (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Aug 2026).

Sponsored posts carry disclosure rules. In the US, the FTC's Endorsement Guides set them.

• The FTC revised its Endorsement Guides for the first time since 2009, to cover promotion through social media, influencers and reviews (Federal Trade Commission, Jun 2023).

How are bloggers using AI?

AI made blogging faster, not better. Nearly every blogger uses it and AI output has flooded the web, yet Google and the chatbots still mostly surface articles written by people.

How do bloggers use AI?

Almost all, mostly for editing and ideas. 58% use AI to suggest edits and 53% to generate ideas (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).

• 39% use AI to write first drafts, and 10% to write complete drafts (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).
• Bloggers who work with a formal human editor report strong results 22% of the time, against 12% for those who let AI edit their work (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).
• Formal editing has fallen from 32% of bloggers in 2020 to 21% (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).
• Almost nine in ten B2B marketers, 89%, use AI tools to generate or optimise written content (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• 12% of B2B marketers say the quality of their content decreased with AI (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• 26.5% of marketers say AI has significantly increased their productivity (HubSpot, Apr 2026).
• 62.7% of marketers say they need more unique, human-centred content to compete (HubSpot, Apr 2026).

How much new web content is AI-generated?

Most of it contains some, but very little is written by a model alone. The typical new page is a mix of human and AI writing. 74.2% of 900,000 web pages created in April 2025 contained AI-generated content (Ahrefs, May 2025).

• Only 2.5% of those pages were entirely AI-written, and 25.8% were entirely human (Ahrefs, May 2025).
• Twelve months after ChatGPT launched, AI-generated articles already made up 39% of new articles (Graphite, Oct 2025).
• The share of AI-generated articles has stayed roughly flat since May 2024 (Graphite, Oct 2025).

How do Google, chatbots and readers treat AI-written content?

Less favourably than writing by people. Chatbots cite human writing most of the time, Google's updates target low-quality output, and readers trust AI answers less.

82% of articles cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity are written by humans (Graphite, Oct 2025).

• Google's March 2024 core and spam updates cut low-quality, unoriginal content in search results by 45%, beyond the 40% it expected (Google, Apr 2024).
• Google's guidance says appropriate use of AI is not against its guidelines, and that using AI mainly to manipulate rankings is spam (Google Search Central, Feb 2023).

Trust in answers from AI chatbots is 20% globally, against 37% trust in news overall (Reuters Institute, Jun 2026).

• The EU AI Act requires anyone publishing AI-generated text on matters of public interest to disclose it, unless a human has reviewed it and someone holds editorial responsibility, with the regulation applying from 2 August 2026 (European Union, Jul 2024).

Methodology and Sources

We built this page from primary sources only: the survey, study, filing or platform page that produced each number. Every URL was fetched on 30 September 2026 to confirm it loads, carries the figure and shows the date. Vendor research (Orbit Media, Ahrefs, Backlinko, Semrush, HubSpot, Graphite, Seer Interactive, SparkToro, Contentsquare) is labelled with the vendor's name, and no single source supplies more than a quarter of the citations. Live platform pages without a publish date (WordPress.com activity, Medium, W3Techs, AdSense help) are dated by the month we checked them. Some foundational reading-behaviour studies are older than five years and are kept because nothing newer measures the same thing at the same depth. The page is refreshed monthly.

Sources

• Orbit Media, 2026 Blogging Statistics (13th annual blogger survey)
• Pew Research Center, Do people click on links in Google AI summaries?
• Pew Research Center, Americans' Social Media Use 2025
• SparkToro, In 2026, less than one third of Google searches still send a click
• Seer Interactive, AIO impact on Google CTR: 2026 update
• Google, AI in Search: driving more queries and higher quality clicks
• Google, New ways we're tackling spammy, low-quality content on Search
• Google Search Central, Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content
• Google AdSense Help, AdSense revenue share
• Cloudflare, 2025 Cloudflare Radar Year in Review
• Contentsquare, 2026 Digital Experience Benchmark
• Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2026 executive summary
• Reddit, Reddit Reports Second Quarter 2026 Results
• W3Techs, Usage statistics of WordPress
• W3Techs, Usage statistics of content management systems
• W3Techs, Historical yearly trends in CMS usage
• Automattic, A live look at activity across WordPress.com
• Medium, About Medium
• Medium Data Lab, The optimal post is 7 minutes
• Substack, A new economic engine for culture
• Ghost, Ghost 6.0
• Semrush, How long should a blog post be?
• Nielsen Norman Group, How little do users read?
• Nielsen Norman Group, Scrolling and attention
• Nielsen Norman Group, How long do users stay on web pages?
• Nielsen Norman Group, Photos as web content
• Edelman and LinkedIn, 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report
• Ahrefs, 96.55% of content gets no traffic from Google
• Ahrefs, How long does it take to rank in Google?
• Ahrefs, 74% of new webpages include AI content
• HubSpot, Optimizing the past: historical blog optimisation
• HubSpot, 2026 State of Marketing
• Content Marketing Institute, B2B Content and Marketing Trends: Insights for 2026
• Backlinko, We analyzed 912 million blog posts
• Backlinko, We analyzed 4 million Google search results
• Moz, Content, shares, and links: insights from analyzing 1 million articles
• Graphite, More articles are now created by AI than humans
• Graphite, AI-generated content does not perform in search
• European Union, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (AI Act)
• Raptive, Opening the door to more creators who meet Raptive quality standards
• Mediavine, Mediavine and Journey requirements
• Goldman Sachs, The creator economy could approach half a trillion dollars by 2027
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Writers and Authors
• Federal Trade Commission, Updated Endorsement Guides announcement

Glossary

• AI Overview / AI summary: the AI-written answer Google shows above or among its search results.
• CMS: content management system, the software a website is built and edited in (WordPress, Wix, Ghost).
• CTR: click-through rate, the share of people who see a result and click it.
• Crawl-to-refer ratio: how many pages a bot fetches for each visitor its platform sends back to the site.
• DAUq / WAUq: Reddit's daily and weekly active uniques, the users it can identify visiting in a day or week.
• Thought leadership: free content that shares a company's or expert's point of view and expertise.
• Zero-click search: a search that ends without a click on any result.