Every year, Orbit Media surveys more than a thousand content marketers about what they create, how they work, and whether it’s actually paying off. Their 2026 results, published this September, are stark: only 14% of marketers now report “strong results” from their content. That’s the lowest figure in the survey’s 12-year history \u2014 down from 26% as recently as 2022.<\/p>\n
Here’s the part that makes the finding genuinely interesting rather than just discouraging: this drop happened in the exact same year that AI adoption among these same marketers hit 92.4% \u2014 an all-time high. Nearly every marketer surveyed is now using AI. Results, meanwhile, went the opposite direction. Google\u2019s own guide<\/a> to helpful content asks the same question: does a page offer original information, research or analysis?<\/p>\n This is where it would be easy to draw the wrong conclusion, and it’s worth being precise about what the data actually shows. The survey’s own analysis is direct: the decline tracks with marketers abandoning practices historically linked to strong results \u2014 not with AI adoption itself.<\/strong> Using AI didn’t statistically predict worse results. What predicted worse results was doing less of the specific, effortful work that used to reliably produce good content.<\/p>\n Practices that became measurably less common over the past year include:<\/p>\n Guest blogging saw the steepest single decline, down 29% year over year, with influencer collaboration close behind at a 22% drop.<\/p>\n Buried in the data is a number that deserves far more attention than it’s getting: marketers who regularly collaborated with outside experts were 2.6 times more likely than the benchmark to report strong results. And yet adoption of that exact practice fell from 25% of marketers in 2017 to just 7% today.<\/p>\n In other words, the single practice most strongly linked to success is also one of the practices marketers have most aggressively cut. That’s not a coincidence worth shrugging off \u2014 it’s close to a direct explanation for the 12-year low.<\/p>\n None of this is really mysterious once you look at it directly. AI made it dramatically faster to produce a draft. The average blog post now takes about 3 hours and 20 minutes to write, down from over 4 hours in 2022 \u2014 a real, measurable time saving. But speed on the writing step doesn’t replace the slower, harder work that actually made content good in the first place: finding real experts to interview, running original research, doing the unglamorous keyword homework, and paying someone to promote what you made.<\/p>\n Ann Handley, chief content officer at MarketingProfs, called the findings a wake-up call, urging marketers to get “much more discerning about which effort we remove, and which we keep.” That framing matters. The problem was never AI adoption itself \u2014 it’s what marketers let AI quietly replace along the way.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.adroitte.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/the-numbers-plainly.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/span>Is AI in Content Marketing the Problem?<\/span><\/h2>\n
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<\/span>The One Stat That Should Change How You Think About This<\/span><\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\n<\/span>Why This Happened<\/span><\/h2>\n
<\/span>What This Means for Your Content Strategy<\/span><\/h2>\n
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