139 Content Marketing Statistics October 2026

Content marketing statistics for 2026 describe a job that got harder on four fronts. Budgets are flat. Teams are not growing. AI writes a large share of what gets published, and search sends fewer clicks to the pages that rank. Marketers feel it too: seventy percent believe marketing has changed more in the past three years than in the previous 50 (HubSpot, Apr 2026).

You can already see the volume problem on the open web. The number of AI-generated articles published online passed the number of human-written articles in November 2024 (Graphite, Oct 2025). Once any team can publish more, volume stops being an advantage, and strategy, original material and proof of results start to matter more.

Every number below links to the organisation that ran the survey or the analysis, with the date of the data. We don't cite other roundups. For search-side numbers, see the SEO statistics hub.

What resources do content teams have in 2026?

Content is competing with AI tools and paid media for a marketing budget that has been shrinking as a share of revenue. The extra money is going into software, ads and agencies, not into the people who make the content.

Is content marketing spend growing?

Barely. Marketing takes under a tenth of revenue, depending on who is asked and how large the companies are, and most teams expect a small increase rather than a large one.

• 79.2% of marketing teams expect at least a slight budget increase in 2026 over 2025, 21.2% expect a significant increase, and 6% expect a cut (HubSpot, Apr 2026).
• Among B2B marketers who know their budget, 46% expected their content marketing budget to rise in 2025, 41% expected it to stay flat and 8% expected a decrease (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• 32% of B2B marketers plan to increase investment in owned media (content assets, website, blog, email) in 2026 (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude top the list of channels marketers plan to invest more in (37.7%), just ahead of content marketing (36.9%) and website, blog and SEO (35.4%) (HubSpot, Apr 2026).
• US marketing leaders report marketing spend at 9.0% of company revenue and 9.6% of overall budgets, and total marketing spending grew only 1.7% over the prior 12 months, the smallest increase since 2021 (The CMO Survey, Apr 2026).
• The average marketing budget is 18% lower as a share of revenue than it was four years ago (Gartner, Jun 2026).
• When profits miss expectations, marketing is cut 45.4% of the time, more often than other expenses (The CMO Survey, Apr 2026).
• 56% of CMOs say their marketing organisation lacks the budget to deliver its 2026 strategy (Gartner, May 2026).

Where is new marketing money going?

Into AI, paid media and video. Agencies are losing budget to paid media, yet about a third of digital marketing work is already handed to outside partners, and that share is still rising.

• CMOs allocate an average of 15.3% of their marketing budgets to AI initiatives (Gartner, May 2026).
• Paid media now takes 31.4% of marketing budgets, funded by cuts to agencies (Gartner, Jun 2026).
• Social media takes 14.3% of marketing budgets, and marketers predict 17.1% within a year, although the survey notes its 12-month social forecasts have run 2.1 points too high on average (The CMO Survey, Apr 2026).
• 61% of B2B marketers expected their organisation to increase investment in video in 2025, and 52% in thought leadership content (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• 92% of video marketers plan to spend the same or more on video in 2026 (Wyzowl, Dec 2025).
• Marketing leaders expect the outsourced share of digital marketing activities to reach 34.3% within two years (The CMO Survey, Apr 2026).
• Retail and wholesale companies outsource the most digital marketing work (57%), while tech, software and platform companies outsource 28% (The CMO Survey, Apr 2026).
• 19% of B2B marketers plan to increase spending on agencies and outsourcing in 2026 (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• 59% of video marketers make their videos in-house, 10% use only outside vendors and 32% mix the two (Wyzowl, Dec 2025).
• 88% of enterprise marketers allocated budget to experiential marketing in 2025, compared with 78% of all B2B marketers (Content Marketing Institute, Jan 2026).

How big are content teams?

Two to five people in most B2B companies that have a dedicated team at all, and hiring plans and federal projections both point to flat headcount.

• 76% of B2B marketers have a dedicated content marketing team or person, and larger organisations are more likely to have one (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• 54% of those dedicated teams have two to five people (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• Of the 24% of B2B organisations with no dedicated content staff, half spread the work across department or product teams and 7% use an outside agency (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• 64% of B2B marketers expected their content team to stay the same size in 2025, 27% expected growth and 6% expected cuts (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• Companies project marketing hires will grow 2.6% in the coming year, with the largest companies expecting to keep shrinking their marketing organisations (The CMO Survey, Apr 2026).
• Writers and authors held about 140,300 US jobs in 2025, and employment is projected to fall by 500 between 2025 and 2035 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Aug 2026).
• About 11,900 openings for writers and authors are still projected each year, mostly to replace people who leave the occupation (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Aug 2026).
• The median US writer or author earned $76,910 in 2025 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Aug 2026).
• Only 9% of B2B marketers put salaries, training and development among their top three investment areas for 2026, the lowest of any option (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).

What holds content marketing back?

Nearly every B2B team has a content strategy now, and most say it improved only a little last year. So the plan on paper is rarely the constraint. People, time and proof of results are.

How effective are B2B content strategies?

Good enough to meet goals for most teams, rarely good enough to beat them, even though almost every B2B team now has a strategy.

• 97% of B2B marketers say they have a content strategy (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• 61% of B2B marketers with a strategy say it improved over the past 12 months: 13% significantly and 48% somewhat (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• 74% of B2B marketers credit strategy refinement for the improvement, ahead of new technology (51%) and team restructuring (40%) (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• 12% of B2B marketers say their marketing was highly effective and exceeded goals in the past year, and 59% rate it at least somewhat effective (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• 68% of enterprise marketers rate their marketing as highly or somewhat effective (Content Marketing Institute, Jan 2026).
• 66% of technology marketers rate their marketing as highly or somewhat effective, and 16% exceeded their goals (Content Marketing Institute, Nov 2025).
• Among effective B2B teams, 65% credit content relevance and quality and 53% credit team skills, while only 20% credit budget (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).

Why do content programs underperform?

Unclear goals come first for B2B marketers, then content that doesn't prompt action and teams without the people to make enough of it.

• 29% of B2B marketers called their content strategy extremely or very effective, while 58% called it moderately effective (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• 42% of marketers who rated their strategy moderate or worse blamed a lack of clear goals (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• Other reasons given were a strategy not tied to the customer journey (39%), not data-driven (35%) and built on weak audience research (29%) (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• The top challenges for B2B marketers are creating content that prompts action (40%), resource constraints (39%) and measuring content effectiveness (33%) (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• 28% of B2B marketers struggle to create enough quality content for their organisation's needs, and 24% struggle to differentiate it from competitors (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• At enterprises, resource constraints (42%) and cross-department collaboration (33%) are the leading challenges (Content Marketing Institute, Jan 2026).
• 45% of B2B marketers lack a scalable model for content creation, and 20% aren't sure whether they have one (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• Only 26% of B2B marketers think their organisation has the right technology to manage content across the business (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).

How long does content take to produce?

A little over three hours for a blog post, before editing, design and promotion, and workloads keep rising. More detail on blog output is in the blogging statistics hub.

The average blog post takes 3 hours 20 minutes to write, down from a peak of 4 hours 10 minutes in 2022 (Orbit Media, Sep 2026). Across a year that adds up. The average content marketer now spends 50 fewer hours writing than in 2022, based on 57 posts a year written 50 minutes faster each (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).

Workloads are rising for most marketers. 25.7% say their workload increased significantly over the past year and 47.4% say it increased moderately, while fewer than 5% saw any decrease (HubSpot, Apr 2026).

Time shortage also decides which formats get made. 19% of marketers who don't use video say they don't have enough time for it (Wyzowl, Dec 2025).

How are teams using AI to create content?

AI is standard in content production now, and its gains are easy to see in speed and volume. The evidence that it improves results is much thinner.

How many marketers use AI for content creation?

Nearly all of them, and the share of marketing work done with AI is set to double again.

• 86.4% of marketing teams use AI in at least a few marketing areas, and only 1.7% neither use it nor plan to (HubSpot, Apr 2026).
• 42.5% of marketers use AI extensively for content creation and 38% use it occasionally (HubSpot, Apr 2026).
• AI is used in 24.2% of marketing activities, up from 13.1% in 2024, and companies expect 55.9% within three years (The CMO Survey, Apr 2026).
• 73.9% of companies use AI for content creation, up from 49.2% in fall 2023, the fastest-growing AI use in marketing (The CMO Survey, Apr 2026).
• 87% of 879 content marketers surveyed use AI to create or help create content (Ahrefs, May 2025).
• 63% of video marketers have used AI tools to create or edit marketing videos, up from 51% a year earlier (Wyzowl, Dec 2025).
• Among technology marketers who use AI, 95% apply it to generating or optimising written content (Content Marketing Institute, Nov 2025).

Does AI make content better or only faster?

Mostly faster. Quality gains are smaller, and a meaningful minority sees quality drop.

• 58% of B2B marketers using AI content tools say content quality improved, while 12% say it got worse (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• At enterprises, 53% report better content quality from AI, and 20% say it's too soon to judge the effect on content performance (Content Marketing Institute, Jan 2026).
• 26.5% of marketers say AI significantly increased their productivity and 66.2% say it increased it slightly or moderately (HubSpot, Apr 2026).
• Only 4% of B2B marketers have high trust in generative AI output, and 17% rate its content quality excellent or very good (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• 92% of content marketers now use AI, yet AI users and non-users are equally likely to report strong results (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).
• 62.7% of marketers believe brands need more unique, human-centred content to compete with AI content (HubSpot, Apr 2026).

How much work does AI do without a human?

Very little so far. Most new pages mix AI and human writing, and AI agents are still an experiment for most B2B teams.

Few pages are written entirely by AI. In the Ahrefs sample, only 2.5% of new pages were pure AI and 25.8% were purely human, while 71.7% mixed the two (Ahrefs, May 2025).

The growth has also levelled off. Twelve months after ChatGPT launched, AI-generated articles made up 39% of new articles, and the share stayed roughly flat over the 12 months to May 2025 (Graphite, Oct 2025).

• 28% of B2B marketers experiment with AI agents, and 3% say agents are core to their strategy (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• 34% of enterprise marketers are experimenting with AI agents and 63% are not yet using them (Content Marketing Institute, Jan 2026).
• 70% of CMOs call becoming an AI leader a critical goal for 2026 (Gartner, May 2026).
• The same share of CMOs, 70%, say their marketing processes are not mature enough to implement and scale AI (Gartner, May 2026).

Which content formats perform best?

Video leads on effectiveness in B2B and on ROI across marketing. Trust is a separate contest, and buyers give it to the formats that carry original data and ideas.

Which content formats do B2B marketers use?

Short articles, video and case studies, with research reports much further down. Audio audiences, meanwhile, are at record size.

• In the past year, 92% of B2B marketers used short articles or posts, 76% videos, 75% case studies, 69% long articles, 57% data visualisations and 51% e-books or white papers (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• Only 36% of B2B marketers used research reports and 27% used interactive content (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• After video, B2B marketers rate case studies (53%), e-books or white papers (45%) and research reports (45%) as the most effective content types (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• 58% of Americans aged 12 and older consumed a podcast in the last month and 45% in the last week, both all-time highs (Edison Research, Mar 2026).
• 57% of Americans aged 12 and older have both listened to and watched a podcast (Edison Research, Mar 2026).

How much does visual content like video matter?

It is close to universal and still pays back for most teams, though less than it did. Production quality also affects trust.

• 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool (Wyzowl, Dec 2025).
• 82% of video marketers say video gives them a good ROI, down from an all-time high of 93% a year earlier (Wyzowl, Dec 2025).
• 71% of marketers say videos between 30 seconds and 2 minutes are the most effective length (Wyzowl, Dec 2025).
• 84% of consumers want to see more video from brands in 2026 (Wyzowl, Dec 2025).
• Short-form video earned the highest ROI of any media format for 48.6% of marketers, well ahead of long-form video (28.6%) and blog posts (22.3%) (HubSpot, Apr 2026).
• 89% of consumers say video quality affects how much they trust a brand (Wyzowl, Dec 2025).

Does thought leadership still pay off?

Yes, and fewer teams are doing it, which leaves room for those who do.

• Publishing original research improves a content marketer's likelihood of strong performance by 50%, yet fewer marketers now publish it (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).
• 96% of B2B marketers say their organisation creates thought leadership, but 37% say fewer than 5% of their in-house experts contribute to it (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• 64% of target B2B buyers, the decision-makers vendors aim at, spend more than an hour a week consuming thought leadership (Edelman and LinkedIn, Sep 2025).
• 56% of target B2B buyers use thought leadership when they evaluate vendors (Edelman and LinkedIn, Sep 2025).
• 41% of target B2B buyers say a C-suite executive encouraged them to consider a vendor after engaging with that vendor's thought leadership (Edelman and LinkedIn, Sep 2025).

Original data is also what other sites link to. See the link building statistics hub for how links are earned.

How does content reach its audience now?

Distribution is changing faster than production. Each ranking now sends fewer clicks, so email, LinkedIn and events have to carry more of the load.

Which distribution channels work best?

Social, company blogs and email reach the most B2B audiences. Events and webinars convert best, and newsletters are one of the few channels where engagement is rising. The email marketing statistics hub covers email in depth.

• 89% of B2B marketers distribute content through organic social media, 84% through their company blog and 71% through email newsletters (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• B2B marketers rate in-person events (52%) and webinars (51%) as the most effective distribution channels (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• 85% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn delivers the best value of any social platform (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• 84% of B2B marketers use paid channels to distribute content, and 61% of them say search ads produce the best results (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• For thought leadership, 76% of B2B marketers rate LinkedIn as effective, followed by email newsletters (54%) and speaking events or webinars (52%) (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025).
• Newsletter publishers on beehiiv sent 28 billion emails in 2025 and reached more than 255 million unique readers (beehiiv, Jan 2026).
• Average newsletter open rates on the platform passed 41% (beehiiv, Jan 2026).
• Paid newsletter subscriptions on beehiiv generated $19 million in 2025, up 138% from $8 million in 2024 (beehiiv, Jan 2026).

How often do teams repurpose content across social platforms?

About half reuse the same content everywhere, and fewer adapt it for each platform. Instagram has overtaken Facebook, and YouTube is where video lives.

• 49.4% of marketing teams reuse the same content across platforms, while 39.5% tailor it for each platform (HubSpot, Apr 2026).
• 35.08% of marketers name repurposing content across channels as one of the top trends they are acting on in 2026 (HubSpot, Apr 2026).
• 37% of B2B marketers say content repurposing is a challenge (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• 70% of brands use Instagram for marketing, passing Facebook (69.6%) for the first time (HubSpot, Apr 2026).
• 54.5% of brands use TikTok and 55.8% use X, but TikTok now ranks higher on ROI (HubSpot, Apr 2026).
• 82% of businesses that market with video upload it to YouTube, and 69% say YouTube is effective for them (Wyzowl, Dec 2025).

How is AI search changing content discovery?

Ranking still matters, but each ranking sends fewer visitors. The AI search statistics hub tracks this in detail.

• 57% of Americans aged 12 and older have ever used a generative AI assistant, a level podcasting took 16 years to reach (Edison Research, Mar 2026).
• Google users clicked a link inside the AI summary on only 1% of visits to pages that showed one (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
• 18% of all Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI summary, and 88% of those summaries cited three or more sources (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
• Users ended their browsing session on 26% of search pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages without one (Pew Research Center, Jul 2025).
• An AI Overview now correlates with a 58% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page, up from 34.5% in the April 2025 study (Ahrefs, Feb 2026).
• AI Overviews appeared for 6.49% of tracked queries in January 2025, peaked at 24.61% in July and settled at 15.69% in November (Semrush, Dec 2025).
• AI Overviews are moving into buying searches: since October 2024, the share of AI Overview keywords with commercial intent rose from 8.15% to 18.57%, and with transactional intent from 1.98% to 13.94% (Semrush, Dec 2025).
• 41.5% of companies already use generative engine optimisation to get their content into AI-generated answers (The CMO Survey, Apr 2026).
• 40.6% of marketers are updating their SEO for search changes, and 70.2% believe they can adapt their strategy to AI Overviews (HubSpot, Apr 2026).

Does content marketing pay off?

Measurement is the weakest part of content marketing, and budget reviews are getting stricter. A team that can't show results is the easiest one to cut.

Can marketers prove content marketing ROI?

About half say they can. The rest can't link content to business goals, and most teams track engagement far more than business impact.

• 51% of B2B marketers agree their organisation measures content performance effectively, while 34% disagree (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• The biggest measurement obstacles are not being able to tie performance to business goals (44%) and a lack of resources or budget (41%) (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• Measuring marketing ROI is the top challenge marketers face in 2026, cited by 33% (HubSpot, Apr 2026).
• 18.9% of content marketers say they don't know whether their blog delivers results, an all-time high (Orbit Media, Sep 2026).

B2B marketers measure thought leadership through audience engagement (80%), business impact such as leads and pipeline (63%) and brand authority (38%) (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2025). Video teams show the same gap: 67% of video marketers measure ROI through views, while 32% measure it through bottom-line sales (Wyzowl, Dec 2025).

What results does content marketing deliver?

• In the past year, content marketing helped 87% of B2B marketers build brand awareness, 74% generate demand or leads, 62% nurture audiences and 49% generate sales (Content Marketing Institute, Oct 2024).
• 85% of video marketers say video helped them generate leads, and 83% say it directly increased sales (Wyzowl, Dec 2025).
• 55.7% of marketers say generating leads is easier now than it was a decade ago (HubSpot, Apr 2026).
• 93.2% of marketers say personalised or segmented experiences have led to more leads and purchases (HubSpot, Apr 2026).

How does content win B2B and B2C buyers?

B2B content does its work before the first sales conversation, because buyers pick a favourite on their own. B2C content fights for attention in feeds, where originality, a human voice and proof that it's real keep people coming back. For search-side B2B data, see the B2B SEO statistics hub.

• B2B buyers bought from their preliminary favourite vendor 77% of the time (6sense, Nov 2025).
• 89% of B2B purchases included AI features, and 58% of buyers contacted sellers earlier to fill in missing details about them (6sense, Nov 2025).
• 70% of B2B buyers said economic anxiety directly influenced which vendor they chose, often in favour of incumbents (6sense, Nov 2025).
• More than 40% of B2B deals stall because of misalignment within the buying group (Edelman and LinkedIn, Sep 2025).
• Hidden buyers, the stakeholders who influence a deal without leading it, value a distinctive format or style in thought leadership more than target buyers do (60% vs. 51%) (Edelman and LinkedIn, Sep 2025).
• After product quality (44%), originality of content (33%) is the top reason consumers stay loyal to a brand, ahead of price and customer service (Sprout Social, Sep 2026).
• 50% of consumers want brands to stop sounding salesy and corporate and sound authentic instead (Sprout Social, Sep 2026).
• 84% of consumers are concerned about running into AI-generated deepfakes, and 38% say it makes them more sceptical of ads in general (Sprout Social, Sep 2026).
• 85% of consumers have been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a video (Wyzowl, Dec 2025).
• 23.6% of B2C brands use influencer marketing, compared with 18.6% of B2B brands (HubSpot, Apr 2026).

Methodology and Sources

Every statistic on this page was traced to the organisation that ran the survey or analysis and checked on the live source page on 30 September 2026: the page loads, the number is on it, and the date matches. We don't cite statistics roundups or reports that repeat other people's numbers. Vendor research (HubSpot, Ahrefs, Semrush, Wyzowl, Orbit Media, 6sense, beehiiv, Sprout Social, Graphite) is cited when the vendor collected the data itself. Several B2B benchmarks on team size, formats, channels and budget direction come from Content Marketing Institute's 2025 report, published October 2024, because the 2026 edition no longer asks those questions. Survey populations differ: Gartner surveyed 401 marketing leaders in North America, the UK and Europe, while The CMO Survey covers US for-profit companies, so their budget figures are shown separately. This page is refreshed monthly as new editions come out.

Sources

• Content Marketing Institute, B2B Content and Marketing Trends: Insights for 2026
• Content Marketing Institute, B2B Content Marketing: 2025 Benchmarks and Trends
• Content Marketing Institute, Enterprise Content and Marketing Trends: Insights for 2026
• Content Marketing Institute, Technology Content and Marketing Trends
• HubSpot, 2026 State of Marketing
• The CMO Survey, Highlights and Insights Report 2026
• Gartner, 2026 CMO Spend Survey press release
• Gartner, CMO Spend in 2026
• Wyzowl, Video Marketing Statistics 2026
• Orbit Media, 2026 Blogging Statistics
• Ahrefs, 74% of New Webpages Include AI Content
• Ahrefs, Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%
• Graphite, More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans
• Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears
• Semrush, AI Overviews' Impact on Search in 2025
• Sprout Social, The State of Social Media in 2026
• Edelman and LinkedIn, 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report findings
• 6sense, 2025 Buyer Experience Report
• beehiiv, The State of Newsletters 2026
• Edison Research at SSRS, The Infinite Dial 2026
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Writers and Authors

Glossary

• B2B: business-to-business, companies that sell to other companies
• B2C: business-to-consumer, companies that sell to individuals
• CMO: chief marketing officer
• AI Overview: the AI-generated summary Google shows above some search results
• GEO: generative engine optimisation, work to get content cited in AI-generated answers
• SEO: search engine optimisation
• ROI: return on investment
• CTR: click-through rate, the share of people who click a result after seeing it
• Thought leadership: content that shares a company's original ideas, data or point of view
• Hidden buyer: a stakeholder who influences a B2B purchase without being the visible decision-maker