Content Marketing Trends and 2026-2028 Projections

Content marketing in 2026 looks busier and quieter at the same time. Spending keeps climbing, almost every team now uses AI to produce work, and yet the search clicks that fed blogs for years are thinning out. The trends below pull from current industry data and our own projections through 2028, so you can decide where your content marketing budget should move next.

Key takeaways from this report:

• The market keeps growing: global content marketing roughly doubled in four years and is on pace to clear $800 billion by 2028.
• AI use is no longer a differentiator: 95% of content marketers already use AI, so the edge has moved from access to application.
• Search clicks are shrinking: AI Overviews now appear on roughly half of Google queries, and zero-click searches have climbed past two-thirds.
• A new channel is forming: visits referred from AI assistants jumped 357% in a year and convert at a much higher rate than organic search.
• Video owns the ROI rankings: short-form video earns more “highest ROI” votes than the next two formats combined.
• Confidence is recalibrating: reported video ROI fell from a 93% peak to 82% as the format matured and teams measured harder.

How big is the content marketing market becoming?

The headline number is still up and to the right. The global market grew from about $413 billion in 2022 to roughly $565 billion in 2025, and most research firms put the forward growth rate near 13.5% a year. We project a slightly slower path of about 12.7%, which still pushes spending past $800 billion by 2028.

The reason we trim the curve matters for planning. AI is lowering the cost of producing each asset, so total spending grows on volume while the price per piece falls. If you read the topline growth as a green light to simply make more, you will add cost without adding return. The smarter move is to fund a sharper content strategy that ties every asset to a business outcome, which sets up the next question: who is actually making all this content now?

Is using AI for content still an edge?

Two years ago, using AI to help write and edit content felt like a head start. That window has closed. Adoption among content marketers rose from 65% in 2023 to 95% in 2025, which puts the trend in the late stage of an S-curve where only a few holdouts remain.

When a tool reaches near-universal use, the advantage shifts from having it to using it well. The teams pulling ahead apply AI to research, outlining, and editing while keeping a human on judgment, originality, and fact-checking. Surveys back this up: marketers who hand full drafts to AI report weaker results than those who use it for ideas and refinement.

“Owning the same tools as your competitor is not a strategy. The teams that win in 2026 treat AI as a research and editing partner, then spend the time it saves on original thinking that a model cannot produce.”
– Emulent Strategy Team

Where AI earns its keep in a content workflow:

• Idea and angle generation: faster topic mapping and headline testing, with a person choosing the angle worth pursuing.
• Editing and tightening: trimming drafts and catching inconsistencies, which is now the most common use among content teams.
• Repurposing at scale: turning one strong piece into formats for search, social, and email without rebuilding from zero.

Using AI well solves the production side. It does nothing for the harder problem on the distribution side, where the clicks that content has always depended on are disappearing.

Where is your search traffic actually going?

This is the trend most likely to surprise a leadership team that still reports on rankings. Google AI Overviews appeared on about 6.5% of queries in January 2025 and reached roughly 48% by spring 2026. As Google answers more questions on the results page, fewer people click through to the source.

We expect coverage to bend toward a ceiling around 72% rather than racing to 100%, because navigational and transactional searches resist summarization. Even so, the effect on clicks is real. Zero-click searches rose from 56% to 69% over the same window, and Gartner projects organic search traffic falling by half by 2028. If your content plan still assumes that ranking equals traffic, your forecasts are already too high.

“Rankings used to be the finish line. Now they are the entry fee. The brands holding their visibility are the ones being cited inside the answer, not just listed below it.”
– Emulent Strategy Team

How to defend visibility as clicks compress:

• Write to be quoted: clear, factual, well-structured passages that answer a question directly are easier for AI systems to cite.
• Strengthen entity signals: consistent author, brand, and product information helps engines trust and reference your pages.
• Track citations, not just positions: add AI visibility to your reporting so the team sees where it appears inside answers.

This is the core of generative engine optimization, and our AI SEO checklist walks through the steps. If some clicks are leaving search for good, the obvious next question is where they are going.

Should you treat AI assistants as a real traffic channel?

The traffic did not vanish. A growing share of it moved to AI assistants. Visits referred from platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini grew about 357% in a single year, rising from roughly 250 million monthly visits to over 1.1 billion.

Keep this in perspective. AI referrals still sit under 1% of total web traffic, and we expect the growth rate to cool as the base gets larger. The reason this channel matters early is quality, not size. AI-referred visitors convert at close to five times the rate of organic search visitors, because they arrive after the assistant has already done the research and sent them with clear intent.

“A thousand visits from an AI assistant can be worth more than ten thousand from a fading search result. We would rather earn the high-intent click than chase volume that no longer converts.”
– Emulent Strategy Team

Getting cited across these surfaces is the heart of search everywhere optimization, which spreads your visibility across Google AI, ChatGPT, and Perplexity instead of betting everything on one engine. Ignore this channel and you cede early ground to competitors who become the default answer in your category. Once you know where attention is going, the question becomes what format earns it.

Which content formats deserve your next dollar?

When marketers were asked which format delivers the highest ROI in 2026, the answer was decisive. Short-form video took 49% of the vote, more than long-form video and live video combined. Written formats still earn their place, with blog posts and case studies in the top five, but the highest-return slots now belong to motion.

This does not mean abandoning the blog. Written content is what AI systems read and cite, so it still anchors your search visibility. The practical read is a balanced mix: written assets to be found and quoted, short-form video to be remembered and shared. For teams investing in motion, our view on the wider video marketing trends and our brand videography work can help you produce at a quality that holds attention.

How to split a content budget across formats:

• Anchor with written content: deep, original articles that earn citations and answer real questions.
• Amplify with short-form video: repurpose your strongest written ideas into clips built for social feeds.
• Reserve for testing: hold a small slice for live video or interactive pieces to see what your audience responds to.

Video clearly leads the ROI rankings, which makes one recent data point worth a closer look: marketer confidence in video just slipped.

Is video still worth it now that confidence has dipped?

For ten straight years, the share of marketers reporting good ROI from video climbed, peaking at 93%. In 2026 it fell to 82%, the first decline on record. That drop is easy to misread as a warning to pull back.

We read the dip as a sign of maturity, not failure. When a channel becomes mainstream, the novelty premium fades and teams start measuring it against harder standards. An 82% satisfaction rate is still one of the strongest results of any format. We project a mild recovery into the mid-80s as production quality and measurement discipline catch up. The risk is not investing in video. The risk is investing without a way to prove what it returns.

“A confidence dip after a decade of hype is healthy. It means teams are finally measuring video against revenue instead of views, and that scrutiny makes the spend smarter.”
– Emulent Strategy Team

What separates video that pays back from video that does not:

• A clear job per video: each piece should move one specific metric, whether that is awareness, leads, or product understanding.
• Length matched to intent: short clips for discovery, longer pieces for buyers who want depth.
• Measurement past the view: tie video to conversions and pipeline, not just likes and watch time.

Putting these content marketing trends to work

The throughline across every trend here is the same: making content is now easy, and earning attention for it is the hard part. The teams that grow in 2026 will spend less energy producing more and more energy making each piece findable, citable, and worth a high-intent click. That takes a plan built around how people actually discover content today, not how they did three years ago.

We help businesses build exactly that. Our team can map your content to the formats and channels with real return, optimize it to be cited across search and AI assistants, and put measurement in place so you can see what works. If you want help turning these trends into a content marketing plan that holds up through 2028, talk to a digital marketing consultant on the Emulent team.