Marketers Using AI Publish 42% More Content [+ New Research Report]

In this article, we’re looking specifically at AI’s impact on content creation. How common is AI content use? What tools do people use? How often do people edit their outputs?

AI use is extremely common in content marketing.

Out of 879 responses, 769 (87%) reported using AI to create or help create content. Just 111 reported that they did not use AI (13%).

If this seems surprising, it’s worth considering that AI is now a native part of Google Docs, Google Sheets, Gmail, Slack, LinkedIn, you name it. It’s hard to avoid.

AI use was most prevalent at small (10–49 employees) and enterprise (1,000+ employees) companies, and least common at micro (1–9 employees) companies:

AI use was most common in marketing teams of 2–10 people, but even at large marketing teams of over 100 people, 89% of respondents said that they used AI:

AI allows companies to significantly increase their content creation.

The median publishing frequency for companies using AI was 17 articles per month. For companies not using AI, the median was 12 articles per month, or 42% lower:

Company size can also impact publishing frequency (bigger companies generally publish more than smaller companies), so it’s helpful to look at the difference in publishing frequency by company size.

The data suggest that AI is having the biggest impact on micro (1–9 employee) and small (10–49 employee) companies, while enterprise companies actually publish more without AI workflows.

Given the amount of legal review and compliance that happens in the biggest companies, this isn’t necessarily surprising:

Here’s how publication frequency was distributed among the responses. Although extreme publication frequencies were reported even for non-AI users, the extreme values were much more common among AI users, with multiple companies using AI to help publish 100, 150, or even 250 pieces of content per month:

Here’s a histogram showing the distribution of publishing frequencies, with the 1% most extreme outlier values excluded for legibility:

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Generative AI is used primarily for writing blog posts.

Our research found that blog posts were the most common content type created by AI (87% of respondents), followed by website copy and landing pages (64%), and social media posts (63%).

Longer, more complex content formats like whitepapers (15%) and ebooks (17%) were the least common content formats created by AI.

Unsurprisingly then, most AI-assisted tasks relate to blog post creation.

When asked how AI was used in different parts of the content marketing and SEO workflow, 76% of respondents said that they used AI to brainstorm topic ideas. 73% reported using AI to create content outlines, and 67% used it for improving their content.

At the other end of the spectrum, creating images (19%), localizing or translating content (22%), and keyword clustering (23%) were the least popular use cases.

ChatGPT was the most commonly used AI tool for content creation, by a significant margin.

44% of respondents reported using ChatGPT, followed by Gemini at 15%, and Claude at 10%.

[blockquote size="small" author="Andrew Bolis" author_photo="https://ahrefs.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Andrew-Bolis.jpeg" alt="" width="400" height="400" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-177643" />" author_job="" link_text="AI & Marketing Consultant" link_url="https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewbolis/"]

“While ChatGPT is a popular tool for content creation, the quality of the content it generates will vary depending on the model you’re using and the quality of the prompts you’re providing. Based on my own usage, I find that Claude, Gemini and Perlexity sometimes generate better quality content even when using simple prompts. So if you’re not happy with ChatGPT’s output, I recommend trying those other tools.”

In total, a staggering 94 different tools were mentioned in the survey. These were the 20 most popular tools mentioned:

I’ve always wondered whether I’m losing out by using gpt4o or Claude, instead of a “wrapper” that combines multiple APIs into one interface. According to our research, probably not.

77% of the AI tools listed by respondents fall into the “LLM” category: that is, they are specific LLM models or model providers, like Claude from Anthropic or gpt-4o from OpenAI.

Only 23% of the listed tools are considered “wrappers”: software tools that use one or several LLM models with additional features added, like SurferSEO or Jasper.

Google has softened its stance on AI disclosure (they recommend disclosing “when it would be reasonably expected”—so it’s far from mandatory). With that in mind, it’s not surprising that very few companies bother to disclose AI use.

Of those companies that use AI, only 16% choose to disclose the use of AI in their content. The remaining 84% choose not to disclose AI use:

Disclosure was most common at micro (1–9 employees) and enterprise (1,000+ employees) companies. Enterprise companies in particular are likely to have rules and regulations that make disclosure necessary:

It’s also slightly reassuring that the companies that are the heaviest of AI content are also the most likely to disclose its use, with 26% of companies publishing majority “pure” AI content disclosing its use:

Generally speaking, very few companies publish solely “pure” AI content.

Only 4% of respondents reported that over 75% of the content they published was pure AI content, without any editing or additional input. In contrast, 50% of respondents reported that none of the content they published was pure AI content.

Almost everyone reviews or edits AI content, in some form.

97% of respondents have some kind of review process for AI content. Manual review was the most common method (80%), followed by working with subject matter experts (35%), and working with an editor (30%). 14% of respondents ask AI to review AI content for accuracy.

Want to learn how AI content performs, or how much companies spend on AI content?

You can download and read our full PDF report here (no email required): The State of AI in Content Marketing.