Content marketers reporting strong results drop to 13.9 percent

Orbit Media says 13.9 percent of the content marketers it surveyed report strong results from their work, the lowest figure in the twelve years it has run the study. The Chicago agency published the 2026 edition on 10 September 2026, based on answers from 1,042 people.

Strong results fell from 26 percent in 2022 to 13.9 percent

The share was between 20 and 30 percent through most of the last decade and stood at 26 percent in 2022. It has roughly halved since. These are self-reported answers collected by a company that sells content services, so the level matters less than the direction, which has pointed down for four years.

Orbit Media found 92.4 percent using AI and no link to results

Almost everyone in the sample now uses AI somewhere in the process. Orbit Media says it found no relationship between using AI and getting stronger results. The tools did save time. An average post took 4 hours 10 minutes in 2022 and takes 3 hours 20 minutes now, which the agency puts at about 50 hours a year for one writer. Average length fell too, from 1,427 words at the 2023 peak to 1,312.

Seven percent now work with an outside expert, against 25 percent in 2017

The practices that correlate with better results are the ones most people have dropped. Collaboration with an outside expert or influencer is down to 7 percent from 25 percent nine years ago, and Orbit Media links it to results 2.6 times better than the benchmark. Writers who use a human editor beat the benchmark by roughly double, while those editing with AI do not. Keyword research has split the field: 23 percent always do it and 23 percent never do.

Cheaper output meets a search result that shows fewer links

Two things are happening at once. Production got quicker and shorter, and the place most of this content was aimed at changed shape. Our report on what 131 SEOs now rank as the top factors put relevance first and the meta description last, and publishers have been buying back traffic they used to get free, spending 113 million dollars on paid search in July alone. Editors should treat the time saved as budget to spend, not as budget cut: an hour returned by a drafting tool buys the expert quote or the piece of original data that the survey associates with better outcomes. Journalists are pushing the same way, with 53 percent rejecting AI-written pitches outright.