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Content marketing and changes in how it works are much greater and more profound than we think. That’s why we’ve created a second part of our article on content marketing trends in 2026. Read the first part here!
Let’s learn together and get to work.
There’s little time and a lot of work to do!
The battle for zero-visit visibility is our reality, but there is a nuance. It’s still not a click on a website, which marketers are constantly fighting for.
That’s why brands that have already experienced a drop in organic traffic from search will start to invest more actively in channels of direct contact with their audience. First and foremost, in email marketing and social media.
As Vova Feldman, CEO of Freemius, notes:
Email and social media seem like the logical choice. They are accessible, relatively free, and have long proven their ability to deliver results.
But even if your content strategy is still tied to search visibility, diversifying your traffic works in your favor. AI search engines evaluate a brand not only by individual pages, but by its entire digital footprint. Activity on social media, a live audience, open letters — all of this strengthens the signal of trust.
This is another side effect of the search transformation that is easy to underestimate. But from a content marketing perspective, it is fundamental.
The market is entering a phase where the ability to work with social media and email is becoming not an additional skill, but a basic competency. There will be more and more brands competing for attention in feeds and inboxes.
And those who do it systematically, rather than situationally, will win.
The first thing to do is to look around. Subscribe to your competitors’ newsletters and carefully review their social networks. This will give you an understanding of what your audience responds to and give you ideas for your own content.
Next, work more broadly:
In 2026, the winner will not be the one who chose the “right” channel, but the one who did not remain hostage to a single source of traffic.
Google has long tried to keep users in research mode. The People also asked and People also searched blocks actually encouraged people to ask new questions. AI chatbots have gone even further. They don’t just answer, they encourage continued dialogue. Each answer automatically generates the next step.
This search scenario is called query fan-out. It is a situation where a single query branches out into a whole series of clarifications, related topics, and additional questions. The user receives not just one answer, but a whole picture.
And here comes the key shift. During such a “fan-out,” AI must anticipate hidden questions that the user has not yet had time to formulate. Consequently, content marketers have to think not in terms of individual keywords, but in terms of conversational logic.
In 2026, success in search will increasingly depend on how well a brand can:
Dozens of books have been written about keyword research. But now that’s just the introduction.
For those who work on search visibility, the rules of the game are getting more complicated. It is not enough to “catch” the main query. You need to understand the patterns of query expansion as a person thinks further, what concerns them after the first answer, what doubts arise at the next step.
In fact, content marketing is becoming more and more like scriptwriting. You no longer just respond to a query. You accompany the user in a conversation.
Remember the era of skyscraper articles? Those giant 8,000-10,000-word guides that tried to cover a topic from A to Z. It’s no surprise that ChatGPT and AI Overviews learned a lot from such materials. The algorithms calmly took this knowledge, reformulated it, and began to feed it to users. Sometimes even with a reference to the author. And sometimes without it.
But there is one thing that AI cannot reproduce. Original data and personal experience.
When an algorithm searches for facts and you have unique information, it has little choice but to quote you. Moreover, this is the type of content that cannot be found anywhere else. Therefore, users are more likely to follow the link to check or learn more.
This is confirmed by the numbers. According to Eliza Gabbert, Director of Content and SEO at LocaliQ, when their team analyzed the pages that receive the most traffic from AI sources, it turned out that 50% of clicks go to materials with original data or proprietary statistics. At the same time, in classic organic search, the same pages only generated about 5% of clicks.
That’s a tenfold difference. This means that AI not only actively references sources with unique data, but also that users actually click through to verify the information.
Publishing your own research and experience creates several interrelated effects that will become critically important for content marketing in 2026.
For example, data from a single customer survey can:
That’s why more and more content professionals in 2026 will be thinking not about how to create more, but about how to create something new.
Personal experience and original data are almost perfect bait for AI search. They simultaneously:
Teams that focus on information gain win not only in search and social media. They win in the most important thing: the trust of their audience.
In 2024, Coca-Cola received a wave of criticism for its awkward AI-generated Christmas ad. In 2025, history repeated itself. H&M and Levi’s had similar problems when it became clear how they were using artificial intelligence in their content. It was against the backdrop of such cases that Meta and European regulators began to talk about rules for labeling AI content.
But in 2026, brands will start doing the opposite. Instead of justifying their use of AI, they will begin to emphasize content created by humans and label it as human-made.
If you scroll through LinkedIn carefully, this narrative is already noticeable. And it is reinforced not by emotions, but by audience behavior.
The facts speak for themselves:
Copywriter Mel Barfield even conducted a survey: would people read material knowing that it was entirely generated by AI? The majority responded negatively.
As independent content marketer and strategist Reggie Powell points out:
In 2026, the human-made label will transform from a technical detail into a marker of quality that content marketers consciously use to build trust.
Artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s going to play an increasingly important role in content marketing — for ideas, data analysis, and routine tasks. But brands that openly emphasize that their key materials are created by humans receive additional credibility from most consumers.
In a world where everything is easy to generate, human involvement is becoming scarce. And scarcity, as we know, is always valued.
The most obvious step is to start honestly labeling content that has been created manually. But there are other practical steps that will help preserve humanity even when AI is involved in the process:
In 2026, the winner will not be the one who completely abandoned AI, nor the one who blindly relies on it. It will be those who clearly show that there is a real person behind this content.
Content marketing has always had a problem with attribution. It is very difficult to say for sure whether a user was more likely to click on an ad or buy a product precisely because they had previously read some useful brand content.
In fact, for a long time, the only more or less understandable metric for most content teams was website traffic.
And this is where it gets interesting. Teams that have been building reports around traffic for years will have to bring other performance indicators to the forefront in 2026.
Is this a bad thing? To answer this question, let’s return to the example of Rand Fishkin.
According to his data, clicks on the Sparktoro website fell by more than 50% between 2020 and 2025. At the same time, page views increased significantly, and the company’s revenue grew more than tenfold.
Of course, not every brand will repeat this scenario. But the fact itself is telling. As the focus shifts from clicks to visibility and recognition, content reports will inevitably change as well.
Clicks are not going anywhere. Algorithms filter out low-intensity, purely informational queries, and a more prepared audience ends up on the site.
The problem lies elsewhere. For many content teams, traffic graphs will look depressing. And in such conditions, you will have to learn to tell a different data story. Explain how content works not only for transitions, but also for:
This will change not only the appearance of reports, but also the very logic of content creation. For example, blogs may feature more branded and conversion-oriented materials, rather than just SEO articles “on demand.”
If clicks are falling, the first step is to look at the content you are creating. Perhaps it ranks well for a keyword, but:
Next, identify 2-3 key metrics that you will track alongside traffic, such as:
In 2026, strong content teams are not those that show “beautiful traffic,” but those that can clearly explain how their content affects business in the new search reality.
And the sooner you start rebuilding your reporting logic, the more comfortable you will feel in this new coordinate system.