Content marketing trends are the changes in how companies produce and measure content that last long enough to move results. For 2026 the data confirms seven, and nearly all of them come from two facts: Google is sending fewer clicks to websites, and AI has turned basic writing into a commodity that costs next to nothing.
We read the first page of Google UK for "content marketing trends" on 10 October 2026. At the top there's an AI Overview. Below it, nine organic results. Only three are lists of content marketing trends: one from January 2025, one written for 2023 and one that Zen Media rewrote in April 2026 as a B2B strategy guide, although Google still shows its 2023 title. Most of the recent, sourced figures come from HubSpot and Coursera, whose pieces cover marketing in general.
| Position | Result | What it is | Sourced data |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | blog.hubspot.com | Marketing trends of 2025 "we expect to continue in 2026", updated March 2026 | Yes, HubSpot's own 2026 State of Marketing report |
| 2 | coursera.org | 9 marketing trends of 2026, July 2026 | Yes, sources up to 2026 |
| 3 | sevenatoms.com | 10 content marketing trends "for 2025", January 2025 | Two figures, sources undated |
| 4 | demandsage.com | 49 content marketing statistics, May 2026 | Sources named but mostly undated, latest dated figure from 2023 |
| 5 | searchengineland.com | Topic archive page on content | Not a trends piece |
| 6 | postmediasolutions.com | 10 trends "for 2023", October 2023 | Yes, but the most recent is from 2022 |
| 7 | forbes.com | Guide to content marketing for 2026, March 2026 | No figures, an interview with Joe Pulizzi |
| 8 | zenmedia.com | B2B content strategy guide for 2026, April 2026 (Google still shows a 2023 title) | Yes, 6sense 2025 and CMI 2026 |
| 9 | designrush.com | Directory page listing articles | No |
Below are the 2026 trends that hold up when checked against the primary source. For each one we say which market the figure was measured in and, where one exists, give the UK figure for the same thing. At the end are the trends the lists keep repeating that recent data doesn't back up.
The 2026 trends in one table
| Trend | Main figure | Source and market | The UK figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fewer clicks from Google | With an AI summary on the page, clicks drop from 15% to 8% | Pew Research Center, 900 adults, United States, March 2025 | 69.5% of searches end without a click, January-April 2026 (SparkToro on Similarweb data) |
| AI everywhere, results flat | 95% use AI, fewer than 4 in 10 see better performance | Content Marketing Institute, 1,015 B2B marketers, mostly North America, 2025 | 30% of UK businesses use at least one AI technology (ONS, September 2026) |
| Budget moving to video | 52% of content marketers are shifting spend to video and multimedia | Siege Media, 353 professionals, late 2025 | Video advertising at £9.3bn, up 20% (IAB UK, 2025) |
| Experience and first-party data | Only 1% of content marketers publish 100% AI work | Siege Media, late 2025 | Macropix case (Italy): 25.55% share of voice on the LED wall cluster, ahead of Amazon (Semrush, July 2026) |
| Thought leadership signed by people | 96% produce it, in many companies fewer than 5% of staff contribute | Content Marketing Institute, 2025 | No public UK figure |
| Audio and podcasts | 27% of UK adults listen to podcasts every week | Ofcom, United Kingdom, May 2026 | This is the UK figure |
| Search via chatbots too | 10% use AI chatbots for news every week (7% in 2025) | Reuters Institute, 48 markets, 2026 | AI Mode rolling out in the UK since 28 July 2025 |
1. Writing to be cited, because Google sends fewer clicks
The best-measured change of 2025-2026 is the loss of clicks from search. The Pew Research Center tracked 68,879 searches made by 900 US adults in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, users clicked a result on 8% of visits. Without a summary, on 15%. Links inside the summary were clicked 1% of the time.
Ahrefs measured the same effect from the website side. In its February 2026 update, based on 300,000 keywords and Google Search Console data, the click-through rate of the top position with an AI Overview above it is 58% lower than expected. The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2026 reports a 33% drop in organic traffic from Google across more than 2,500 news sites between November 2024 and November 2025.
In the UK the picture is, if anything, starker. According to SparkToro, using Similarweb data, 69.5% of UK Google searches between January and April 2026 ended without a click: the highest share of the countries in the study, above the 68.0% recorded in the United States. For every thousand searches the UK sends 232 clicks to the open web, the US 231. And since 28 July 2025 AI Mode has been rolling out in the UK: Google says early users ask questions two or three times as long as a traditional search.
For anyone producing content, the practical consequence is a single one. An article has to contain something the AI can't summarise without attributing it: a figure you measured, a precise definition, a comparison with stated criteria. Everything else gets absorbed into the answer and the click never comes. We've explained how to earn the mention in our guide to citations in AI answers, and how much the effect weighs on traffic in our piece on zero-click searches.
2. AI is in every content team, the results aren't
The Content Marketing Institute surveyed 1,015 B2B marketers, mostly in North America, between June and August 2025. 95% use AI applications and 89% use them to write copy. But in the press release that accompanies the research the CMI sums it up like this: nine in ten use AI to produce content, fewer than four in ten say it has improved performance.
The same study shows where the money is going. 45% will increase investment in AI tools in 2026, while investment in people comes last at 9%. That's a choice that produces volume. Google, though, has a precise rule on volume: its spam policies include "scaled content abuse", which explicitly mentions using generative AI tools to create many pages without adding value for users.
In the UK, business adoption has climbed steadily. In the ONS Business Insights and Conditions Survey for September 2026, 30% of businesses said they used at least one AI technology, against 9% in September 2023. The figure rises to 38% among businesses with 10 or more employees and to 51% among those with 250 or more. People are further ahead than companies: in the DSIT Public Engagement Survey, run between November 2025 and March 2026 with more than 30,000 respondents, 59% of UK adults had used some form of generative AI in the previous three months.
Read from the point of view of a UK SME, these figures say two things. First, mass-produced AI content is already a crowded game: with nearly a third of businesses using AI, and most of their readers using it too, competing on volume means competing with everyone. Second, AI pays off most where it takes away repetitive work (transcripts, first drafts, source checks) and leaves a person in charge of the part the reader notices. What the data says about how AI-written content gets indexed and ranked is in our article on AI content and SEO.
3. Budget is moving to video
In the 2026 survey by Siege Media, a US agency, of 353 content marketing and SEO professionals, 52% say they will shift more spend to video and multimedia. 39% are moving it away from blogs and long-form content. Wyzowl's 2026 report (266 respondents, late 2025) finds that 91% of businesses use video in their marketing and that 63% of those making video have already used AI tools to create or edit it.
The most solid UK figure comes from advertising. IAB UK's Digital Adspend study, published on 3 March 2026, puts UK digital advertising in 2025 at £40.5bn, up 10% on the year before. Video accounts for £9.3bn, grew by 20%, twice as fast as the market, and makes up 23% of all digital spend. That's money spent on ad space, not on organic content, but it shows where the attention companies pay for is heading.
The Reuters Institute confirms it from the audience side: 77% of people across the 48 markets studied watch online news video every week. For a company this doesn't mean shooting videos at random. It means that a topic you cover today with an article should also have a video version, made for YouTube, where video can be found through search. The ranking rules are in our guide to YouTube SEO and the one on video SEO.
4. Experience and first-party data become the difference
If writing is cheap, what counts is what only you can write. In the American lists this trend turns up under different names: Backlinko splits it into first-hand experience and original research, WordStream calls it information gain, meaning the amount of new information a page adds compared with those already in the results. The Siege Media figure points the same way: only 1% of content marketers say their work is entirely AI-generated.
Here's an example from one of our projects in Italy, already published. Macropix makes custom LED screens in Milan. Of the nine keywords that now bring it the most qualified leads, none contains the company name: the biggest is "ledwall" (LED wall), with 4,400 searches a month in Italy, where the site ranks first. In July 2026, according to Semrush, Macropix had a 25.55% share of voice on the LED wall cluster, against 18.08% for amazon.it. It got there with pages that answer technical questions a generalist can't write about, such as price or the difference between outdoor and indoor use. The full story is in our piece on SEO for manufacturing and in the Macropix project page.
For most companies the raw material is already there: quotes, customer questions, sales data, mistakes seen in the field. What's missing is the step that turns it into content. An hour-long interview with the sales engineer usually yields more new information than ten articles written by looking at competitors.
5. Everyone does thought leadership, few put their name to it
96% of the B2B marketers surveyed by the Content Marketing Institute say their company produces thought leadership content. In the same study, fewer than 5% of employees contribute in many companies. Put plainly: thought leadership exists as a label on the blog, much less as an opinion signed by the people who work on the projects.
Personalisation follows the same pattern. 89% of respondents say they personalise content, but almost 60% do it on only one or two channels and 85% stop at email. In B2B, where a sale often runs through a handful of people who know each other, moving the byline from the brand to the technical lead or the founder is the move with the best cost-to-results ratio in 2026. How to build it into a B2B strategy is in our guide to B2B content marketing.
6. In the UK a quarter of adults listen to podcasts every week
Here there's a recent figure measured on a UK sample. According to Ofcom's audio research published on 20 May 2026, 27% of UK adults now listen to podcasts every week, and the regulator says podcasts continue to grow in popularity. In the 2025 edition weekly listening was 28% among 25-34s and 30% among 35-44s, against 12% among the over-65s.
A company podcast makes sense when there's a person with something to say and the stamina to keep saying it for a year. It works better if it's also recorded on video: episodes uploaded to YouTube become searchable, and the transcript becomes material for articles and posts.
7. Search runs through chatbots too
The Reuters Institute measures the use of chatbots to get news: 10% of people across the 48 markets in the Digital News Report 2026 do it every week, up from 7% the year before. 42% of those who use them say they always or often click through to the original source. It's a small share of the audience, but it's the share that lands on your site after already reading an answer.
A Semrush study from July 2025, built on more than 500 topics in digital marketing and SEO, estimates that a visitor from AI search is worth 4.4 times a visitor from traditional organic search, measured on conversion rate. Semrush expects AI search visitors to overtake organic ones in early 2028. It's a forecast about one specific sector and should be taken as such. The direction, though, is the same as all the other data: the page has to work even when someone reads it summarised by a model. How to measure how often your brand appears in those answers is in our guide to AI visibility, and since ads on ChatGPT went live in the UK on 6 June 2026, the same surface has become paid space as well.
The trends the lists repeat but the data doesn't support
Two items come back in the content marketing trend lists on the UK first page and still have no recent figures behind them.
Voice search. It's trend number four in the Postmedia list, whose most recent source is from 2022, and it has its own section in the Seven Atoms list, which gives no figures on it. We found no 2025 or 2026 measurement showing voice search growing enough to change the way you write. Meanwhile, long questions in natural language have arrived from somewhere else: AI Mode and chatbots.
Augmented and virtual reality. Seven Atoms puts virtual tours and virtual try-ons at the top of its list, again without a single figure. For a company deciding where to put its content budget in 2026, it's a topic best left to people who sell headsets.
The test we used is simple: a trend makes the list if it has at least one figure measured in 2025 or 2026 on a stated sample. Anyone writing a trends piece should apply it before publishing, because an article about trends with numbers from three years ago describes the past.
How to measure content marketing when clicks are falling
If 69.5% of UK searches end without a click, measuring visits alone makes even content that works look like it's losing. These are the four metrics we use on projects:
- impressions in Google Search Console for the topic's queries, which show whether the page is seen even when it isn't clicked;
- searches for the brand name, which grow when people come across you in answers and then look you up;
- citations and mentions in the answers of AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Gemini, checked against a fixed set of questions;
- leads and quote requests attributed to pages, the only number the person paying cares about.
How to turn them into targets and a calendar is in our content marketing plan built on numbers, and the market data to start from is collected in our content marketing statistics checked at source. If you want to know how visible your site already is in AI answers and what's missing, that's the work we do in our SEO for AI service.
FAQs
Seven are confirmed by 2025-2026 data: fewer clicks from Google and content written to be cited in AI answers, widespread use of AI with flat results, budget moving to video, the growing weight of experience and first-party data, thought leadership signed by people, steady podcast listening (27% of UK adults every week) and search that also runs through chatbots.
Yes, if it contains information that can't be found elsewhere. 39% of the content marketers surveyed by Siege Media are moving spend away from long-form content, but in the UK Google still sends 232 clicks to the open web for every thousand searches (SparkToro, January-April 2026), and an article with first-party data is also the source AI answers cite.
30% in September 2026, up from 9% in September 2023, according to the ONS Business Insights and Conditions Survey. The share is 38% among businesses with 10 or more employees and 51% among those with 250 or more. Among adults, 59% had used some form of generative AI in the previous three months (DSIT, November 2025 to March 2026).
Yes, but generic content earns less. In the United States, with an AI summary on the page, clicks on results drop from 15% to 8% (Pew Research Center, March 2025). The pages that hold up have a figure, a definition or a comparison that the AI answer has to attribute to its source.
An advantage that still costs little
The table at the top shows something trend lists don't say. On the UK first page for this topic, the pages devoted to content marketing trends date from 2023 and January 2025, and their sources are undated or from 2022. The fresh numbers come from HubSpot, which runs its own State of Marketing survey, and from Coursera, which covers marketing in general. The pieces cited most often in the US bring their own surveys with hundreds of respondents: Siege Media has 353, the Content Marketing Institute more than a thousand. To beat a 2023 list you don't need a survey. One verified figure, with the market stated and updated every year, is enough.
It's also why an article about trends has a use-by date written into it. We'll reopen this one in September 2027 and take out whatever the data no longer confirms. The same goes for any company archive: deciding what to update and what to delete pays off more than a new article, and the method is in our guide to content pruning.
