69% of Marketers Are Publishing More AI Content Than Last Year (New Research Report)

301 respondents shared what they’re using AI for, how it affects their productivity, their favorite tools, and more.

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.

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 23 skill-file process as part of his content engineering workflow.

Guides like these acorss the web have likely inspired people to improve the outputs they can generate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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).