Marketers Who Won't Write With AI Are Down to 5% — in Just Two Years

I came across a number recently, and I stared at it for a long time.

Two years ago, 65% of marketers flatly refused to let AI anywhere near their blog posts.

And now?

5%.

Two years. From 65% to 5%. My first reaction: this isn't "adoption." They swapped out the table entirely. And the people still seated at the old one may not even have noticed.

In HubSpot's marketing report this year, nearly 94% of marketers plan to use AI for content. Blog posts, emails, images, video editing — the whole pipeline counts.

What does "the new normal" mean? It means using AI is no longer news. Not using it is.

Here's the interesting part: another data point trails quietly behind this one. The time spent per article has been dropping for years.

Where is the saved time going? Into producing more articles.

Good thing or bad? Hold off on the verdict. Let's walk the floor, table by table.

Search Is Dead? It Just Found a New Way to Live

Last year, the running theme in marketing circles was writing SEO's obituary. Budgets shrank and morale was grim.

This year the wind shifted. 61% of marketers increased their search budgets; last year that number was 44%. Investment in AI SEO is even more dramatic: 98%.

Why? And here's the weird part: on one side, AI search and AI overviews have eaten a big chunk of the clicks; on the other, organic search still accounts for nearly 47% of all web traffic — one in every two visits starts in a search box.

Search didn't die. The bar just got higher.

Where do AI overviews show up most? Informational searches — 88% of them. In other words, when users ask "what is" or "which should I pick," AI answers for you. If you want to be cited by AI, named in the overview, you need something it can't take away from you.

What can't it take away?

Original data.

86% of marketers are increasing their original research budgets this year. Why? Because teams that publish original data hit conversion rates of 64%, and 61% report better organic traffic and search performance. When AI-generated content floods the web, the data you dig out with your own hands becomes a moat nobody can copy.

Where Did All the Attention Go

Now let's look at the people.

The current ratio of social media users to non-users is 2 to 1, and the average person touches 6.83 platforms a month.

6.83 platforms. Think about it — users can barely keep up themselves. What makes yours the content that gets seen?

First instinct probably says TikTok. Or Instagram. And corporate budgets are indeed piling onto those two platforms.

But the number one platform for product discovery is Facebook.

Facebook — the granddaddy of them all. Users are more likely to discover new products there than on any of the younger platforms. The venues with the highest short-video engagement are the same familiar faces: Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

X is the lone exception — users are leaving, and budgets are following them out.

Now, a mismatch that made my jaw drop.

Podcasts. Global listeners reached 584 million in 2025, and in the US, 158 million people listen every month. 81% of listeners say podcast ads hold their attention better than TV, radio, outdoor, or feed ads.

So how much budget do marketers allocate to podcasts?

3.8%.

81% of the attention, 3.8% of the money. That's not a gap — that's a chasm. Whoever figures out how to fill it first is first to reap the upside.

By the way, podcasts are going video too. A third of US podcast listeners tune in on YouTube, and listeners themselves say watching the video version makes them feel more connected to the hosts and guests.

Two Underrated Old Friends

Finally, two things so old they've got gray hair.

Email. The highest-ROI channel in B2C marketing is still email. The reason 46% of consumers open brand emails is almost embarrassingly simple: those emails have consistently been relevant.

And what does personalization look like at most teams? Dropping the recipient's first name into the email.

That's personalization? That's politeness.

The people actually making big money on personalization lean on data. And on the data front, B2C players are broadly miserable: only about a quarter of them manage to unify most of their data sources. The top performers clearly lean harder on first-party data and intent data, at rates well above the average.

Unifying data is thankless work. That's why so few do it. Do the hard work upfront, and the payoff stays on the back end.

Back to That 5%

We've come full circle. Back to the beginning.

From 65% to 5%: AI drove down the cost of producing content. But after reading through the reports from HubSpot, Sprout Social, and Wyzowl, I realized what actually separates winners from losers was never who used AI hardest.

Three-quarters of marketers use AI for images and video. More than 80% use it to write emails. Everyone has the tools.

Once the tools are leveled, every bit of the remaining gap is judgment. Judgment about what to do and what to skip, which piece of data is worth digging up by hand, and whether 81% of the attention deserves more than 3.8% of the budget.

The table has already changed. The chips are in your hands.

I hope you take your seat at the new table soon — and that you know exactly which hand to push those chips in on.