For the second year in a row, we’ve surveyed marketers to understand the impact AI is having on all aspects of content marketing.
301 respondents shared what they’re using AI for, how it affects their productivity, their favorite tools, and more.
Key takeaways:
- AI use in content creation is almost ubiquitous, with 93% of respondents saying they utilize it
- Claude is the most-used model for content creation, chosen by 83.2% of AI users, followed by ChatGPT (75.7%) and Gemini (57.9%).
- Twice as many marketers use AI to check AI-assisted content (from 14% in 2025 to 28.6% in 2026).
- More of the content respondents are producing is ≥75% AI, but that’s still the minority of what’s published
93% of respondents are using AI to help create content
Out of 301 responses, 280 (93%) reported using AI to create or help create content, up from 87% in last year’s survey.
Among the 6.98% who don’t use AI, almost all cited accuracy as a concern, and more than half said they generally distrust AI-generated content.
While the numbers are substantial, they shouldn’t be too surprising.
As Ahrefs’ Ryan Law previously noted, with countless “legacy” tools like Gmail, Google Docs, and Slack each getting AI integrations, the opportunities to utilize it are everywhere.
Then there’s the growth of platforms like ChatGPT in general. OpenAI announced 800 million weekly active users in October 2025, 900 million in February 2026, and passed 1 billion by the end of July.
There were more respondents in last year’s survey, so any comparisons will be only on high-level responses, rather than anything granular.
“You can’t put AI back in the bottle. 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.”
Mateusz Makosiewicz, Marketing Researcher & Educator, Ahrefs
61% say their view of AI-generated content has become more positive
More than half of respondents noted their view of AI-generated content has become more positive over the past year. 38% say it’s somewhat more positive and 23% say it’s much more positive.
While we don’t have data on exactly why that is, a combination of model improvements, operational efficiencies, and building better systems likely had some impact.
As an example, as Ahrefs’ Director of Content Marketing, Ryan utilizes a 23 skill-file process as part of his content engineering workflow.
Guides like these across the web have likely inspired people to improve the outputs they can generate.
AI is helping marketers produce content faster
85% of marketers using AI say they’re producing content faster since adopting it: 47.9% say they’re much quicker and 37.1% say they’re slightly quicker.
Just 2.5% say AI has slowed down their content production.
Last year we highlighted that AI users published 42% more content than non-AI users. This year, the speed of content creation is one of the clear highlights.
“I’ve been creating content for nearly 14 years, to the tune of literally thousands of articles. Even with all my experience, AI helps me produce better content faster. But I still spend 4-6+ hours per piece.”
“I agree that AI helps produce content faster. But I don’t see it necessarily as a good thing. 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 (e.g., who’s the audience, what should be included/excluded, etc.), 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.”
Si Quan Ong, SEO & Marketing Educator, Ahrefs
AI use is growing fastest for specialized tasks like data analysis and keyword clustering
Among marketers using AI, the biggest increases over last year were for more specialized tasks.
Using AI for data analysis rose from 28% to 60%, image creation from 19% to 43%, and keyword clustering from 23% to 45%.
Interestingly, in last year’s data, these were some of the least popular uses of AI.
Again, growth here could be a mix of improved models and outputs, more people sharing their workflows, AI use becoming habitual, and similar factors.
Claude is the most-used AI tool among respondents
Among respondents who use AI, 83% use Claude, 76% use ChatGPT, and 58% use Gemini.
They were followed by Claude Cowork (42%), Claude Code (37%), and Codex (13%).
It was almost a year ago that Claude introduced SKILL.md files, allowing users to create reproducible processes easily.
While I acknowledge I may be in a marketing “bubble” at times, it seemed to coincide with a clear shift towards using the platform over the likes of ChatGPT. 68% of survey respondents who use AI say they use skill files, with 55% creating their own.
Though, of course, things can swiftly change in this era of models one-upping each other.
The 2025 survey asked which tool respondents used to create content, while this year’s question allowed multiple selections, so the figures aren’t a direct market-share comparison.
Some people also wrote in tools that were already options, which were added to the total counts.
Only 2.7% of marketers trust AI-generated content without any human review
Two-thirds (66%) of marketers trust AI-generated content only if a human reviews it first. Just 2.7% trust it with no review at all.
Among marketers who use AI, distrust is rare: just 6% say they generally distrust it, compared with 57% of those who don’t use AI at all.
69% of marketers say the share of AI content they publish grew in the past year
Across all respondents, 69% say they’re publishing a larger share of AI content than a year ago. Among AI users, the figure rises to almost three-quarters (74%).
It’s important to note that growth in AI-assisted content doesn’t mean more unedited writing.
Among respondents who answered that none of their published content is pure AI, more than half (58%) still noted their share has grown.
“Listen, AI is a tool, not a disenfranchising dystopia. 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.”
Garrett Sussman, Director of Marketing, iPullRank
Most respondents say human writing still beats their AI content
56% of AI users say human-written content is better quality than their AI content, and 23% say it’s “way better”.
Interestingly, a lot of the quality perspective depends on who you ask.
Almost half (43%) of founders and business owners say their AI content beats human writing, compared to just 17% of junior and mid-level marketers.
Twice as many marketers now use AI to check AI content
29% of marketers using AI now ask AI to check the quality of their AI-generated content, up from 14% last year.
Respondents were encouraged to select all options that apply, so the answers can add up to more than 100%.
The most common way to check outputs is manual self-checking. This year, even fewer respondents said they don’t check results at all.
“I always think of the Dunning-Kruger effect when it comes to AI content. 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.
In the past, I’ve tried to save time by leaning on AI to one-shot content, but whenever the information was new to me, I felt compelled to fact-check it manually.
Even when an AI quality check flagged issues, I wasn’t reassured. It just made me wonder what else AI had got wrong or missed. 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.
Relying on AI to do 100% of the content creation and fact-checking is not an approach I’d recommend unless you know the subject inside out.
If you don’t, spend time researching, and THEN use AI for content and quality checks, so you can be a better judge of its output.”
Louise Linehan, Content Marketer, Ahrefs
41% of respondents aren’t saving money on writers with AI
Almost half of those using AI say it hasn’t saved them any money on writers or freelancers, and 26% don’t know whether it has.
A clear explanation is that only 28% of AI users work with outside writers. The rest create content in-house, or write it themselves.
Among those who reported saving money, the typical savings are $1,001-$2,000 a month.
Only 22% of respondents disclose AI use, but that’s an increase from last year
78% of marketers using AI don’t tell website visitors they’ve used AI to help create their content. 22% openly disclose it, up from 16% in our 2025 survey.
A lot of this likely depends on what people count as ‘AI content.’
If you’re getting feedback on stats or the structure of an article, that’s something totally different to having AI write most (if not all) of the words on the page.
Interestingly, though, those publishing the most pure AI content weren’t any more likely to disclose it.
7% of respondents publish primarily “pure” AI content
7% of marketers using AI say more than 75% of the content they publish is pure AI, without any editing or additional input. That’s up from 4% in 2025.
40% say none of the content they publish is pure AI, down from 50% last year.
If you’re interested in increasing or refining your own AI content workflows, my colleague Mateusz wrote a guide on creative ways to write with AI, without losing your soul.
