Content Marketing Success Hits 12-Year Low Amid AI Adoption

Content marketing performance has declined to its lowest point in 12 years, with only 14% of marketers reporting strong results, according to Orbit Media's latest annual blogging survey. This figure represents a six-percentage-point drop from the previous 12-year low and is nearly half the 26% reported in 2022. The survey suggests this decline is attributed to marketers abandoning historically effective tactics rather than the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) itself. The report concluded that proven content marketing practices most closely linked to strong results became less common over the past year. These abandoned practices include influencer collaboration, original research, keyword research, paid content promotion, formal human editing, and consistent use of analytics. Ann Handley, chief content officer at MarketingProfs, described these findings as a "wake-up call," emphasizing the need for marketers to be "much (MUCH!) more discerning about which effort we remove, and which we keep." The survey found that AI adoption reached 92.4% this year, but its use showed no direct relationship with stronger content marketing results. However, AI did contribute to reduced production times, with the average blog post now taking 3 hours and 20 minutes to write, down from over 4 hours in 2022. This efficiency gain saves the typical marketer approximately 50 hours of writing time annually, even as reported content performance continues to decline, Orbit estimated. The findings also challenge the notion that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become less relevant in the AI era. Marketers who conducted keyword research were more likely to report strong results, despite a decrease in the number of respondents who stated they research keywords before publishing. Influencer collaboration emerged as the tactic with the strongest relationship to success. Marketers who regularly collaborated with experts were 2.6 times more likely than the benchmark to report strong results. Despite this strong correlation, the adoption of influencer collaboration has significantly decreased, falling from 25% of marketers in 2017 to just 7% this year. The survey also noted that traffic has become a less meaningful performance metric as AI influences how individuals consume content.