Content marketing statistics are the numbers that measure how much companies produce content, how much they invest in it and what they get back in traffic and customers. Most of the ones in circulation come from round-ups that give no year, no sample and no indication of which market they were measured in.
We checked this on page one of Google UK for "content marketing statistics" on 10 October 2026. Every figure in the snippets is about marketers in general, and none is measured on UK businesses. Four of the nine organic results were published between 2022 and 2023, a fifth is titled "80 Content Marketing Statistics For 2024", and the third result is an Australian agency's list of more than 120 statistics.
Here you'll find the 2025-2026 numbers taken from the primary source, with market and sample stated. Where a UK figure exists for the same thing we put it alongside: ONS, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, SparkToro, Ahrefs and two checks we ran ourselves on Italian sites.
The main figures in one table
The table sums up the numbers used in the rest of the article. The market column is the one to look at before quoting them: a figure on North American marketers and one on UK businesses don't measure the same population.
| Figure | Value | Market and sample | Source and year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Businesses that have a website | 68% | UK, all businesses (3,911 surveyed) | DSIT, UK Business Data Survey 2024 (fieldwork October 2023-February 2024) |
| SME employers using technology to sell to customers online | 23% | UK, 8,396 employers with 1-249 staff | Department for Business and Trade, Longitudinal Small Business Survey 2024 |
| Businesses with 10+ employees using at least one AI technology | About 35% (about 12% in September 2023) | UK, businesses with 10+ employees | ONS, Business Insights and Conditions Survey, June 2026 |
| B2B marketers whose company uses AI applications | 95% | 1,015 B2B marketers, mostly North America | Content Marketing Institute, survey June-August 2025 |
| Bloggers who use AI | 92.4% | 1,042 content marketers, not broken down by country | Orbit Media, 2026 |
| Bloggers reporting strong results | 13.9% (all-time low) | 1,042 content marketers, not broken down by country | Orbit Media, 2026 |
| Average length and time of a post | 1,312 words, 3 hours 20 minutes | 1,042 content marketers, not broken down by country | Orbit Media, 2026 |
| Google searches that end without a click | 69.5% (United States 68.0%) | UK, Similarweb panel, January-April 2026 | SparkToro, June 2026 |
| Clicks to the open web per 1,000 searches | 232 (United States 231) | UK, Similarweb panel, January-April 2026 | SparkToro, June 2026 |
| UK keywords showing an AI Overview | 19.1% | UK, 23 million keywords | Ahrefs, November 2025 |
| Pages that get no traffic from Google | 96.55% | Ahrefs index, about 14 billion pages | Ahrefs, 2023 |
| Pages already in the top 100 with less than one organic visit a month | 30.7% (980 of 3,194) | Six Italian sites | Visilay, 2026 |
Adoption: UK businesses are further behind than the round-ups suggest
One of the most repeated figures in round-ups is that "90% of marketers use content marketing". It describes people who do marketing for a living, mostly in the United States. The closest UK figures measure something else, businesses, and tell a different story. According to the UK Business Data Survey 2024 from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, published on 27 June 2024, 68% of UK businesses have a website. In the Longitudinal Small Business Survey 2024, only 23% of SME employers use technology to sell to customers online, down 4 points on 2023. For business use of social media, the most recent official UK figure we found is from 2016.
On artificial intelligence the gap is even wider. Research by the Content Marketing Institute for 2026, carried out with MarketingProfs among 1,015 B2B marketers between 24 June and 14 August 2025, says 95% work at a company that uses AI applications. In the UK, according to the ONS, about 35% of businesses with 10 or more employees used at least one AI technology in June 2026, almost triple the 12% of September 2023. Among businesses with 250 or more employees the figure rises to 49%. Large language models, the closest measure to generative AI, are used by 18% of businesses with 10 or more employees.
The two numbers aren't strictly comparable, because the first counts marketers and the second counts businesses. They do say something useful to anyone planning content: a mid-sized UK company that publishes regularly, with data of its own, is still the exception in its sector. The ONS also points to the main obstacle, and it isn't skills: in its Management and Expectations Survey for 2023, 39% of firms cited difficulty identifying a use for AI, 21% cost and 16% the level of expertise.
To build a calendar starting from these numbers we've written a guide to the content marketing plan, and a version specifically for companies that sell to other companies on B2B content marketing.
Company blogs: how much gets written and what it returns
The annual survey by Orbit Media, run every year since 2014, is the longest time series on bloggers' work. The 2026 edition collected answers from 1,042 content marketers, without a breakdown by country. An average post is 1,312 words long, against the peak of 1,427 in 2023, and takes 3 hours 20 minutes of work, against 4 hours 10 in 2022.
The number that matters most is another one: only 13.9% say their blog delivers strong results, the lowest figure since the survey began. In the same sample 92.4% use AI to write, and Orbit Media notes that AI use isn't correlated with better results. Those who publish original research, on the other hand, are 50% more likely to report strong results, even though fewer and fewer bloggers do it.
Siege Media surveyed 353 marketing professionals in November and December 2025 and measured how the use of AI in content work is changing. The share using it to write drafts fell from 57% to 44% in a year; the share using it to edit rose from 19% to 38%. 52% plan to increase spending on video and 39% to move away from blogs and long-form content.
A first-hand figure for comparison: in our own editorial plan we timed 47 articles adapted by hand by an editor, with a median of 55 minutes per piece. An article with original data takes between 6 and 10 hours. The cost of those hours is worked out in our article on how much content marketing costs; the link between word count and results in the one on the ideal length of a blog post.
AI in content marketing: more productivity, flat performance
The Content Marketing Institute research separates two things that round-ups tend to add together. 87% of those using AI to create content say they've gained productivity. Only 39% say content performance has improved, 34% see no difference and 22% don't know.
The difficulties reported point the same way. In first place is creating content that prompts action, such as a conversion (40%); then constraints on time, people and budget (39%); third, measuring effectiveness (33%). For 2026, 45% expect to increase investment in AI-based marketing tools.
Read together, the CMI, Orbit Media and Siege Media figures say AI has lowered the cost of producing an article without raising its return. What that means for rankings we've analysed in AI content and SEO; the disclosure question is covered in AI-generated content.
Search and clicks: the UK figure the round-ups leave out
Almost all the zero-click statistics quoted in round-ups are American. In June 2026 SparkToro, Rand Fishkin's company, published figures for six countries from Similarweb's desktop and mobile panel, covering January to April 2026. The UK is one of them.
| Country | Zero-click searches | Clicks to the open web per 1,000 searches | Sessions that end after the search |
|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | 62.1% | 287 | 39.5% |
| Italy | 63.4% | 280 | 38.8% |
| Canada | 63.8% | 268 | 38.2% |
| France | 65.3% | 271 | 42.3% |
| United States | 68.0% | 231 | 39.0% |
| United Kingdom | 69.5% | 232 | 43.1% |
In the UK every thousand Google searches produce 232 clicks to sites not owned by Alphabet, against 231 in the United States and 280 in Italy. The UK also has the highest share of zero-click searches of the six countries and the highest share of sessions that end after the search, 43.1%. So anyone applying American data on the fall in clicks to a UK site isn't overstating the loss: here the two markets are almost identical. The direction is clear where a time series exists: on the US market SparkToro measures 68.01% zero-click searches in 2026, against 60.45% in 2024 and 49% in 2019.
The main cause is the AI Overview. The Pew Research Center followed 900 US adults in March 2025, across 68,879 searches: when the generated summary appears, visits that end with a click on a result fall from 15% to 8%, and only 1% click a link inside the summary. In the UK, where AI Overviews arrived in August 2024, the Ahrefs study published in November 2025 found them on 19.1% of 23 million keywords, against 20.5% in the United States.
With fewer clicks available, on the projects we manage visibility is measured on the share of a whole group of searches rather than on a single ranking. For Macropix, an Italian manufacturer of LED screens, the page for "monitor pubblicitario" (advertising monitor) went from position 88 to position 2, and the site holds a 25.55% share of voice on the LED wall cluster, ahead of Amazon at 18.08% (Semrush, July 2026). The same topics, one by one: zero-click searches, AI Overviews and how to measure brand visibility in AI answers.
How many pages bring no traffic, on our sites and elsewhere
The 2023 Ahrefs study of about 14 billion pages shows that 96.55% get no visits from Google and 1.94% get between one and ten a month. The causes listed are three: topics with no search demand, no backlinks, and the wrong search intent.
The figure covers every page on the web, including ones never meant for search, so it doesn't measure how a company blog performs. We ran a narrower check on six Italian sites, counting only pages already in the top hundred positions for at least one search: of 3,194 pages, 980 produce less than one estimated organic visit a month, or 30.7%. The share runs from 21% to 52% across sites that differ sixty-fold in size. The sample is Italian, but the method works the same on any site; it's explained, with what to do next, in our article on content pruning.
The statistics that circulate without a date
Some numbers come back in almost every round-up, and they have two things in common: they're old, and nobody quotes them with the year. We looked for the earliest traceable appearance of the most repeated ones.
| Statistic | Traceable origin | Why not to quote it like that |
|---|---|---|
| Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads | Attributed to Demand Metric; already in a Neil Patel round-up from January 2016 | The Demand Metric page gives no date, sample or method |
| Companies that blog get 55% more visitors and 434% more indexed pages | HubSpot data on its own customers, reported by PR Daily on 25 January 2011 | It measures customers of a piece of software fifteen years ago, before mobile and AI Overviews |
| 8 out of 10 people only read the headline | A 1963 print advertisement, traced in our article on headlines | It isn't a measurement on the web |
| Twitter is the channel used by 91% of companies | Zazzle Media survey, still being quoted in 2018 | The platform has changed its name, owner and distribution rules |
None of these numbers is necessarily false. The problem is that they describe another market at another time, and anyone quoting them without a year presents them as if they applied to the UK today.
How to check a statistic before quoting it
The check takes a few minutes and comes down to four questions:
- Who measured it? Follow the links to the page of whoever ran the survey or study. If the chain ends on a round-up of round-ups, the figure has no source.
- When? A click figure from before August 2024, when AI Overviews arrived in the UK, describes a different results page.
- On whom? Marketers, businesses and users are different populations; "mostly North America" belongs next to the number.
- What exactly does it measure? "Strong results" in Orbit Media is the blogger's own statement, not a traffic figure.
It's the same method we use for SEO statistics and for choosing tools in our guide to content marketing tools. When the right figure doesn't exist, it's worth producing it: in our SEO consultancy projects we start from Search Console and the client's sales data, and some of the results are published among our projects.
Frequently asked questions
There's no reliable public figure. Official surveys measure the spread of digital tools (68% of UK businesses have a website, according to DSIT's UK Business Data Survey 2024), but not spending on content. The budget percentages that circulate come from American surveys.
69.5% in January-April 2026, according to SparkToro on Similarweb data, the highest of the six countries measured. In the United States the share is 68.0%. In the UK every thousand searches produce 232 clicks to the open web, against 231 in the United States.
Yes, but generic content returns less. When an AI summary appears, clicks on results fall from 15% to 8% (Pew Research Center, United States, 2025). Those who publish original research are 50% more likely to report strong results, according to Orbit Media.
About 1,312 words, according to Orbit Media's 2026 survey of 1,042 content marketers, not broken down by country. The average writing time is 3 hours 20 minutes. The right length, though, depends on the length of the results on page one for the keyword.
Not without stating where it comes from. It's attributed to Demand Metric, has been circulating since at least 2016 and the source page gives no date or method. Recent figures with a stated sample are a better choice.
The missing figure is the easiest to produce
Across the whole of page one on Google UK there isn't a single content marketing statistic measured on UK businesses, and that's because nobody has published one, not because it's hard to get. A company with two years of Search Console data already holds numbers no competitor has: how many articles bring at least one click a month, how long it takes from publication to first conversion, which searches bring impressions but no clicks. Publishing them, even on fifty pages, is worth more than repackaging yet another American round-up, and it's the only kind of content an AI summary has to cite rather than summarise.
