StatisticsUpdated October 3, 2026
Blogging statistics for 2026
How long posts take to write, how long they should be, how many ever get search traffic, what bloggers earn, and how AI changed publishing and clicks. Every number links to the study it comes from.
125 statistics from 24 publishers · every figure checked against its original source on October 3, 2026
- 96.55%96.55% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google at all.Ahrefs, 2023
- 13.9%13.9% of content marketers say their blog delivers strong results, an all-time low for the survey.Orbit Media, 2026
- 50%About 50% of new articles published online are primarily AI-generated, equal to the share written by humans.Graphite, 2026
- 1.74%Only 1.74% of newly published pages reach Google’s top 10 within a year, down from 5.7% in 2017.Ahrefs, 2025
Key takeaways
The blogging numbers that matter most in 2026
Every line stands on its own: copy it with its source, or link straight to it. The full list, section by section, follows.
The average blog post takes 3 hours, 20 minutes to write, down from a peak of 4 hours 10 minutes in 2022.
Annual survey of 1,042 content marketers and bloggers
The average blog post is 1,312 words long, down from a peak of 1,427 words in 2023.
Annual survey of 1,042 content marketers and bloggers
96.55% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google at all.
Analysis of about 14 billion pages in Ahrefs’ Content Explorer index
Only 1.74% of newly published pages reach Google’s top 10 within a year, down from 5.7% in 2017.
Tracked 1 million random URLs first seen in September 2023
The typical content piece loses about 76% of its peak traffic within three months of peaking.
719 editorial pieces across three client portfolios, GA4 data
Fractl, 2026: Content Decay: When Does Content Peak and Die?
About 50% of new articles published online are primarily AI-generated, equal to the share written by humans.
55,400 Common Crawl articles, three AI detectors, 2020–2026
Graphite, 2026: AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans
Google users click a traditional search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appears, versus 15% without one.
Browsing data from 900 U.S. adults, March 2025
Pew Research Center, 2025: Do people click on links in Google AI summaries?
Bloggers take a median of 12 months to earn their first dollar from their blog.
Blogging Income Survey of 187 individual bloggers
Productive Blogging, 2025: How much do bloggers REALLY earn in 2025? (Statistics from the Blogging Income Survey)
Websites using Outrank, an AI SEO agent, reached a median of 2.0× their previous Google clicks about 7 months after starting.
2,119 sites with Search Console connected, each indexed to its 28 days before joining Outrank.
Outrank dataDo AI SEO agents work? We tracked 2,119 sites
Part 1
Size of the blogosphere
How much gets published, and where.
About 70 million new posts are published each month on sites hosted on WordPress.com or connected through Jetpack.
Live activity counter for WordPress.com and Jetpack-connected blogs
WordPress.com, 2026: A live look at activity across WordPress.com
Readers leave about 77 million new comments each month on blogs hosted on WordPress.com or connected through Jetpack.
Live activity counter for WordPress.com and Jetpack-connected blogs
WordPress.com, 2026: A live look at activity across WordPress.com
Over 409 million people view more than 20 billion pages on WordPress.com-hosted and Jetpack-connected sites every month.
Live activity counter for WordPress.com and Jetpack-connected blogs
WordPress.com, 2026: A live look at activity across WordPress.com
Blogs hosted on WordPress.com are written in more than 120 languages.
Language breakdown of blogs hosted on WordPress.com
WordPress.com, 2026: A live look at activity across WordPress.com
40.2% of all websites run on WordPress, the most common blogging and content management system.
W3Techs daily survey of technologies used by top-ranked websites
58.6% of websites that use a known content management system run WordPress.
W3Techs daily survey of technologies used by top-ranked websites
31.5% of websites use none of the content management systems that W3Techs monitors.
W3Techs daily survey of technologies used by top-ranked websites
Substack has passed 5 million paid subscriptions across its newsletters and blogs.
Company-reported platform total
Substack, 2025: About Substack
More than 100 million people use Medium to read and share writing every month.
Company-reported monthly audience
Medium, 2026: About Medium
More than a million Medium members support the platform, which does not sell advertising.
Company-reported paying membership
Medium, 2026: About Medium
Part 2
How bloggers work
Time per post, publishing cadence and how AI changed the workflow.
The average blog post takes 3 hours, 20 minutes to write, down from a peak of 4 hours 10 minutes in 2022.
Annual survey of 1,042 content marketers and bloggers
The average content marketer now spends 50 fewer hours a year writing than in 2022, about 50 minutes saved per post.
Annual survey of 1,042 content marketers and bloggers
Companies using AI publish a median of 17 articles per month, versus 12 for companies that do not use AI.
Survey of 879 content marketers and SEOs
Bloggers need 300 or more published posts, on average, to earn over $1,000 a month from their blog.
Blogging Income Survey of 187 individual bloggers
Productive Blogging, 2025: How much do bloggers REALLY earn in 2025? (Statistics from the Blogging Income Survey)
Bloggers with 1,000 or more posts earn an average of $7,981.67 per month, down from $11,578.73 the year before.
Blogging Income Survey of 187 individual bloggers
Productive Blogging, 2025: How much do bloggers REALLY earn in 2025? (Statistics from the Blogging Income Survey)
64% of SEO and content professionals use a human-led, AI-assisted workflow, the most common content production model.
Survey of 224 SEO and content marketers
Semrush, 2026: Does AI content rank well in search? [Survey + Data study]
At least 65% of SEO and content professionals use AI for core writing tasks such as research, editing and on-page optimization.
Survey of 224 SEO and content marketers
Semrush, 2026: Does AI content rank well in search? [Survey + Data study]
Part 3
What results bloggers report
Fewer bloggers report strong results, and the ones who do share a few habits.
13.9% of content marketers say their blog delivers strong results, an all-time low for the survey.
Annual survey of 1,042 content marketers and bloggers
18% of content marketers say they do not know whether their blog delivers results, up from 9–14% in earlier years.
Annual survey of 1,042 content marketers and bloggers
Content marketers who collaborate with influencers are 2.6x as likely as average to report strong blogging results.
Annual survey of 1,042 content marketers and bloggers
Only 7% of content marketers now collaborate with influencers on their content, down from 25% in 2017.
Annual survey of 1,042 content marketers and bloggers
Publishing original research improves a content marketer’s likelihood of reporting strong results by 50%.
Annual survey of 1,042 content marketers and bloggers
Content marketers using six or more proven content strategies are nearly three times as likely to report strong results.
Annual survey of 1,042 content marketers and bloggers
59% of B2B marketers rate their content marketing as at least somewhat effective; only 12% call it highly effective.
CMI/MarketingProfs survey of 1,015 B2B marketers, mid-2025
Content Marketing Institute, 2025: B2B Content and Marketing Trends: Insights for 2026
61% of B2B marketers with a content strategy say its effectiveness has improved.
CMI/MarketingProfs survey of 1,015 B2B marketers, mid-2025
Content Marketing Institute, 2025: B2B Content and Marketing Trends: Insights for 2026
Bloggers with five or more revenue streams earn, on average, more than double what single-stream bloggers earn per pageview.
Blogging Income Survey of 187 individual bloggers
Productive Blogging, 2025: How much do bloggers REALLY earn in 2025? (Statistics from the Blogging Income Survey)
46% of HubSpot’s monthly blog leads came from just 30 individual blog posts.
Internal analysis of HubSpot’s own blog traffic and leads
Part 4
Post length, headlines and format
Length, headlines and formats that earn links, shares and citations.
The average blog post is 1,312 words long, down from a peak of 1,427 words in 2023.
Annual survey of 1,042 content marketers and bloggers
The average page on Google’s first page of results contains 1,447 words.
Analysis of 11.8 million Google search results
Blog content longer than 3,000 words earns 77.2% more referring-domain links than content under 1,000 words.
Analysis of 912 million blog posts with BuzzSumo share and link data
Articles of 1,000–2,000 words get 56.1% more social shares than articles under 1,000 words.
Analysis of 912 million blog posts with BuzzSumo share and link data
Blog headlines of 14–17 words get 76.7% more social shares than short headlines.
Analysis of 912 million blog posts with BuzzSumo share and link data
Blog headlines phrased as a question get 23.3% more social shares than headlines that are not questions.
Analysis of 912 million blog posts with BuzzSumo share and link data
Blog posts of 3,000 words or more get 138% more page views than posts under 500 words.
State of Content Marketing 2022 analysis of blog articles
Semrush, 2022: How Long Should a Blog Post Be? A Data-Driven Guide for 2024
53.4% of pages cited in Google AI Overviews are shorter than 1,000 words.
Analysis of 174,048 pages cited in 560,346 AI Overviews
Listicles keep only about 12% of their peak traffic six months after peaking.
719 editorial pieces across three client portfolios, GA4 data
Fractl, 2026: Content Decay: When Does Content Peak and Die?
Part 5
Blogs and Google search traffic
Most pages get no search traffic, rankings take years, and AI answers take a growing share of clicks.
96.55% of pages get no organic search traffic from Google at all.
Analysis of about 14 billion pages in Ahrefs’ Content Explorer index
Only 1.74% of newly published pages reach Google’s top 10 within a year, down from 5.7% in 2017.
Tracked 1 million random URLs first seen in September 2023
72.9% of pages ranking in Google’s top 10 are more than three years old, up from 59% in 2017.
Top 10 results for 1.3 million random US keywords
The page ranking #1 on Google is, on average, 5 years old, compared with 2 years old in 2017.
Top 10 results for 1.3 million random US keywords
94% of blog posts and articles earn zero external links from other websites.
Analysis of 912 million blog posts with BuzzSumo share and link data
The #1 organic result on Google gets an average click-through rate of 27.6%.
Search Console data for 1.3 million pages and 12.2 million queries
58.5% of US Google searches and 59.7% of EU searches ended without a single click in 2024.
Datos clickstream panel of US and EU searchers, 2024
Only 360 of every 1,000 US Google searches send a click to a website not owned by Google or paying for ads.
Datos clickstream panel of US and EU searchers, 2024
Google users click a traditional search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appears, versus 15% without one.
Browsing data from 900 U.S. adults, March 2025
Pew Research Center, 2025: Do people click on links in Google AI summaries?
AI Overviews cut the click-through rate of the top-ranking page by 58% on average.
300,000 keywords, December 2023 vs December 2025
Ahrefs, 2026: Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%
Google showed AI Overviews on 15.69% of keywords in November 2025, after peaking near 25% in July.
10 million+ keywords plus Datos clickstream data, 2025
Semrush, 2025: Semrush Report: AI Overviews’ Impact on Search in 2025
Part 6
Reading behaviour
Readers scan, skim and leave fast. The first screen does most of the work.
On an average web page, visitors have time to read at most 28% of the words; 20% is more likely.
Analysis of page-view logs from a browsing-behaviour field study
Nielsen Norman Group, 2008: How Little Do Users Read?
57% of page-viewing time is spent above the fold, down from 80% in 2010.
Eyetracking of 120 participants, over 130,000 fixations on desktop
Nielsen Norman Group, 2018: Scrolling and Attention
74% of web page viewing time is spent in the first two screenfuls of content.
Eyetracking of 120 participants, over 130,000 fixations on desktop
Nielsen Norman Group, 2018: Scrolling and Attention
Visitors often leave web pages within 10–20 seconds, so a page must communicate its value within 10 seconds.
Microsoft Research analysis of over 2 billion page dwell times
Nielsen Norman Group, 2011: How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages?
Average engaged time on news and media pages was just 28 seconds in the first quarter of 2025.
Chartbeat engagement data across news and media sites
Chartbeat, 2025: How to Increase Return Visits on News Websites
86% of first-time visitors to news and media sites do not return within the next seven days.
Analysis of 300 million+ first-time visits to news and media sites
Chartbeat, 2025: How to Increase Return Visits on News Websites
First-time visitors who view two pages are 2.75x more likely to return than those who view just one.
Analysis of 300 million+ first-time visits to news and media sites
Chartbeat, 2025: How to Increase Return Visits on News Websites
Only 9% of visitors who engage with a page for 25 seconds return, versus 22% of those who engage for 125 seconds.
Analysis of 300 million+ first-time visits to news and media sites
Chartbeat, 2025: How to Increase Return Visits on News Websites
Desktop visitors scroll through 50.5% of a page on average, compared with 45.2% on mobile.
99 billion sessions across 6,500 websites in 9 industries
Contentsquare, 2026: Benchmarks: What Does Engagement Look Like in 2026?
The average website session lasts 4:46 minutes on desktop, about twice the 2:20 minutes recorded on mobile.
99 billion sessions across 6,500 websites in 9 industries
Contentsquare, 2026: Benchmarks: What Does Engagement Look Like in 2026?
Overall website engagement fell 10% year over year, with time on site down 7% and scroll rate down 2%.
99 billion sessions across 6,500 websites in 9 industries
Contentsquare, 2026: Benchmarks: What Does Engagement Look Like in 2026?
Part 7
Updating old posts and content decay
Traffic peaks within months and then decays, which makes updates one of the best-paying tasks in blogging.
Updating and republishing old blog posts increased their monthly organic search views by an average of 106% on HubSpot’s blog.
Internal analysis of HubSpot’s own blog traffic and leads
76% of HubSpot’s monthly blog views came from posts published before that month.
Internal analysis of HubSpot’s own blog traffic and leads
A typical editorial article reaches its peak traffic a median of four months after publication.
719 editorial pieces across three client portfolios, GA4 data
Fractl, 2026: Content Decay: When Does Content Peak and Die?
The typical content piece loses about 76% of its peak traffic within three months of peaking.
719 editorial pieces across three client portfolios, GA4 data
Fractl, 2026: Content Decay: When Does Content Peak and Die?
Research and data articles peak within a median of one month, then shed 89% of their traffic within three months.
719 editorial pieces across three client portfolios, GA4 data
Fractl, 2026: Content Decay: When Does Content Peak and Die?
How-to articles are the most durable format, still retaining roughly 30% of their peak traffic a full year later.
719 editorial pieces across three client portfolios, GA4 data
Fractl, 2026: Content Decay: When Does Content Peak and Die?
Pages cited by AI assistants are on average 25.7% fresher than pages ranking in Google’s organic results.
16.975 million cited URLs across AI assistants and Google SERPs
Of ChatGPT’s 1,000 most-cited pages with a detectable date, 89.7% had been updated in 2025.
Analysis of ChatGPT’s top 1,000 cited pages
Part 8
Blog monetisation and affiliate income
How blogs and newsletters make money, and how long it takes.
More than 100,000 publishers now make money on Substack through paid subscriptions.
Company-reported platform figure
Substack, 2026: A business model that works for creators - by Chris Best
The top 10 Substack publications collectively earn more than $100 million a year.
Company-reported platform figure
Substack, 2026: A business model that works for creators - by Chris Best
Substack writers keep 90% of their subscription revenue, minus credit card fees.
Published platform revenue share
Substack, 2026: About Substack
Publications running on Ghost earn more than $100,000,000 in revenue each year.
Company-reported platform figure
Publishers receive 80% of AdSense for Content display revenue after the advertiser platform takes its fee.
Published AdSense revenue share policy
Google, 2026: AdSense revenue share - Google AdSense Help
When advertisers buy AdSense display ads through Google Ads, publishers keep about 68% of the revenue.
Published AdSense revenue share policy
Google, 2026: AdSense revenue share - Google AdSense Help
Bloggers whose main income is display ads earn an average RPM of $33.80, the lowest of any monetisation method.
Blogging Income Survey of 187 individual bloggers
Productive Blogging, 2025: How much do bloggers REALLY earn in 2025? (Statistics from the Blogging Income Survey)
Bloggers whose main revenue stream is digital products earn an average RPM of $283.64, nearly ten times that of ad-led blogs.
Blogging Income Survey of 187 individual bloggers
Productive Blogging, 2025: How much do bloggers REALLY earn in 2025? (Statistics from the Blogging Income Survey)
Bloggers take a median of 12 months to earn their first dollar from their blog.
Blogging Income Survey of 187 individual bloggers
Productive Blogging, 2025: How much do bloggers REALLY earn in 2025? (Statistics from the Blogging Income Survey)
Bloggers on Mediavine’s Journey ad program earn an average RPM of $11.15.
Blogging Income Survey of 187 individual bloggers
Productive Blogging, 2025: How much do bloggers REALLY earn in 2025? (Statistics from the Blogging Income Survey)
Bloggers need a median of 36 months to reach a full-time income, and 28% get there within two years.
Blogging Income Survey of 187 individual bloggers
Productive Blogging, 2025: How much do bloggers REALLY earn in 2025? (Statistics from the Blogging Income Survey)
Part 9
AI and blogging
AI now writes a large share of what gets published. Google and readers still favor human-led content at the top.
92.4% of content marketers now use AI for blogging, yet AI use shows no correlation with stronger results.
Annual survey of 1,042 content marketers and bloggers
About 50% of new articles published online are primarily AI-generated, equal to the share written by humans.
55,400 Common Crawl articles, three AI detectors, 2020–2026
Graphite, 2026: AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans
Within 12 months of ChatGPT’s launch, 35.9% of newly published articles were primarily AI-generated.
55,400 Common Crawl articles, three AI detectors, 2020–2026
Graphite, 2026: AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans
74.2% of newly created web pages contain some AI-generated content.
900,000 new pages detected in April 2025, one per domain
86.5% of pages ranking in Google’s top 20 contain at least some AI-generated content.
Top 20 results for 100,000 random keywords (600,000 pages)
Blog posts are the most common AI-created content type, produced with AI by 87% of surveyed marketers.
Survey of 879 content marketers and SEOs
86% of articles ranking in Google Search are written by humans; only 14% are AI-generated.
Articles in top two Google SERPs for sampled keywords, June 2025
17.31% of Google’s top 20 search results were AI-generated in September 2025, down from a 19.56% peak in July.
Top 20 results for 500 popular keywords, tracked since 2019
Originality.ai, 2025: Amount of AI Content in Google Search Results - Ongoing Study
Blog pages ranking #1 on Google have an 80.5% probability of being human-written, versus 10% for AI-generated pages.
AI-detector analysis of 42,000 ranking blog pages, November 2025
Semrush, 2026: Does AI content rank well in search? [Survey + Data study]
72% of SEO professionals who use AI content believe it ranks at least as well as human-written content.
Survey of 224 SEO and content marketers
Semrush, 2026: Does AI content rank well in search? [Survey + Data study]
89% of B2B marketers at AI-using organizations use AI tools to generate or optimize written content.
CMI/MarketingProfs survey of 1,015 B2B marketers, mid-2025
Content Marketing Institute, 2025: B2B Content and Marketing Trends: Insights for 2026
12% of B2B marketers say the quality of their content decreased after adopting AI.
CMI/MarketingProfs survey of 1,015 B2B marketers, mid-2025
Content Marketing Institute, 2025: B2B Content and Marketing Trends: Insights for 2026
About 94% of marketers plan to use AI in their content creation, including blog articles, in 2026.
HubSpot State of Marketing survey of 1,500+ global marketers
HubSpot, 2026: 2026 Marketing Statistics, Trends, & Data
Part 10
Business blogging
Blogs remain one of the formats marketers rely on for ROI.
38% of marketers used blog posts in 2025, making blogs the third most popular content format after short- and long-form video.
HubSpot State of Marketing survey of 1,500+ global marketers
HubSpot, 2026: 2026 Marketing Statistics, Trends, & Data
22.26% of marketers name blog posts among their highest-ROI content formats, placing blogs in the top five.
HubSpot State of Marketing survey of 1,500+ global marketers
HubSpot, 2026: 2026 Marketing Statistics, Trends, & Data
Small businesses are 23% more likely than the average company to see ROI from blog posts.
HubSpot State of Marketing survey of 1,500+ global marketers
HubSpot, 2026: 2026 Marketing Statistics, Trends, & Data
27% of marketers rank website, blog and SEO as a top ROI-driving channel, the highest of any channel.
HubSpot State of Marketing survey of 1,500+ global marketers
HubSpot, 2026: 2026 Marketing Statistics, Trends, & Data
96% of B2B marketers say their organization creates thought leadership content.
CMI/MarketingProfs survey of 1,015 B2B marketers, mid-2025
Content Marketing Institute, 2025: B2B Research Finds Winning Marketing Teams Build Fundamentals
77% of Fortune 500 companies had an active public-facing corporate blog in 2020.
Annual review of all Fortune 500 company websites
UMass Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research, 2020: The Fortune 500 adapt to the sudden and unprecedented COVID-19 global pandemic.
Corporate blog use among the Fortune 500 more than tripled from its 2015 low of 21%.
Annual review of all Fortune 500 company websites
UMass Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research, 2020: The Fortune 500 adapt to the sudden and unprecedented COVID-19 global pandemic.
Only 15% of Fortune 500 corporate blogs allow readers to post comments.
Annual review of all Fortune 500 company websites
UMass Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research, 2020: The Fortune 500 adapt to the sudden and unprecedented COVID-19 global pandemic.
Part 11
Blogs and AI search
What AI answers cite, how long they are, and how rarely their users click through.
37.9% of pages cited in Google AI Overviews also rank in the top 10 organic results, down from about 76% in July 2025.
863,000 keywords and 4 million AI Overview URLs
Only 32.3% of ChatGPT’s 1,000 most-cited pages are ones marketers can realistically influence, such as blogs, reviews and news.
Analysis of ChatGPT’s top 1,000 cited pages
82% of articles cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity are written by humans; 18% are AI-generated.
Articles cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity for sampled queries, 2025
Only 7% of articles ranking #1 on Google are AI-generated, below their 14% share of all ranking articles.
Articles in top two Google SERPs for sampled keywords, June 2025
Wikipedia is ChatGPT’s most-cited source, accounting for 7.8% of all its citations.
680 million AI citations, August 2024–June 2025
Reddit is the top cited source in both Google AI Overviews, at 2.2% of citations, and Perplexity, at 6.6%.
680 million AI citations, August 2024–June 2025
50% of links in ChatGPT-4o responses point to business and service websites.
Semrush analysis of links in ChatGPT-4o answers
52% of the sources cited in Google AI Overviews also rank in the top 10 organic results for that query.
Analysis of 405,576 Google AI Overviews
78% of Google AI Overviews contain an ordered or unordered list.
Analysis of 405,576 Google AI Overviews
Google AI Overviews are 157 words long on average, and 99% of them are under 328 words.
Analysis of 405,576 Google AI Overviews
Users click a link inside Google’s AI summary in just 1% of visits to pages that show one.
Browsing data from 900 U.S. adults, March 2025
Pew Research Center, 2025: Do people click on links in Google AI summaries?
Users end their browsing session on 26% of Google search pages showing an AI summary, versus 16% without one.
Browsing data from 900 U.S. adults, March 2025
Pew Research Center, 2025: Do people click on links in Google AI summaries?
60% of Google searches starting with question words such as “who”, “what” or “why” produce an AI summary.
Browsing data from 900 U.S. adults, March 2025
Pew Research Center, 2025: Do people click on links in Google AI summaries?
AI assistants send just 0.2% of all website traffic, even though AI-referred visits grew 632% year over year.
99 billion sessions across 6,500 websites in 9 industries
Contentsquare, 2026: How Digital Traffic is Changing in 2026 And What to Do About It
Original data
What happens when a blog publishes every day: original Outrank data
Search Console data from thousands of blogs that publish with Outrank: how long growth takes, which article formats still earn clicks, and what gets cited by AI.
Websites using Outrank, an AI SEO agent, reached a median of 2.0× their previous Google clicks about 7 months after starting.
2,119 sites with Search Console connected, each indexed to its 28 days before joining Outrank.
Outrank dataDo AI SEO agents work? We tracked 2,119 sites
For websites using Outrank, an AI SEO agent, most traffic growth came after month three: median Google clicks were up 27% after 84 days and 2.0× by month 7.
2,119 sites with Search Console connected, each indexed to its 28 days before joining Outrank.
Outrank dataDo AI SEO agents work? We tracked 2,119 sites
76.8% of Outrank websites that auto-published AI-written articles gained Google clicks, against 62.5% of websites that did not.
1,247 sites with a publishing integration, 136 without.
Outrank dataDo AI SEO agents work? We tracked 2,119 sites
“What is” definition pages earned 0.52× the Google click-through rate of the same website’s other articles at the same positions.
Same-site comparison at Google positions 4 to 10, 6.2 million pages from 3,332 sites.
At the same Google visibility, websites with 100+ articles got up to 3.4× more AI citations than websites with fewer articles.
200 websites; AI citations from Ahrefs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode) matched with Search Console.
67% of websites studied with fewer than 50 pages showing in Google had zero AI citations.
200 websites; AI citations from Ahrefs (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode) matched with Search Console.
Question queries ranking in Google’s top 3 got 58% fewer clicks than other top-3 queries on the same website (median site studied).
Median site, 39 sites with enough top-3 queries of both kinds.
Methodology
How we built this page
- Primary sources only: every number links to the organization that collected the data, not to another roundup.
- Checked against the source: each figure was matched to the text of its source page on October 3, 2026. Numbers we could not find in the source were left out.
- Recent first: 84% of these statistics were published in 2024 or later. Older figures stay only when they are still the most recent large study on the question, and each one shows its year.
- Same meaning, plain words: statements are rewritten to stand alone, but keep the source’s population, period and unit.
- Original data: the Outrank figures come from Search Console and platform data described in each linked study.
- Updates: we refresh this page every quarter. Spotted an outdated or wrong number? Email support@outrank.so.
Cite this page
Outrank (October 3, 2026). Blogging Statistics 2026: 120+ Numbers With Sources. https://www.outrank.so/statistics/blogging
Writers, journalists and researchers are welcome to quote any statistic on this page. Please link to this page or to the original source shown under each number.
All 45 sources
- Ahrefs (2026). Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%
- Ahrefs (2026). Update: 38% of AI Overview Citations Pull From The Top 10
- Ahrefs (2025). Marketers Using AI Publish 42% More Content [+ New Research Report]
- Ahrefs (2025). Short vs. Long Content in AI Overviews: The Data Says Both Work
- Ahrefs (2025). How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google? And How Old Are Top Ranking Pages?
- Ahrefs (2025). New Study: AI Assistants Prefer to Cite “Fresher” Content (17 Million Citations Analyzed)
- Ahrefs (2025). 67% of ChatGPT's Top 1,000 Citations Are Off-Limits to Marketers (+ More Findings)
- Ahrefs (2025). 74% of New Webpages Include AI Content (Study of 900k Pages)
- Ahrefs (2025). AI-Generated Content Does Not Hurt Your Google Rankings (600,000 Pages Analyzed)
- Ahrefs (2023). 96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]
- Backlinko (2023). We Analyzed 4 Million Google Search Results. Here's What We Learned About Organic CTR
- Backlinko (2020). We Analyzed 11.8 Million Google Search Results. Here’s What We Learned About SEO
- Backlinko (2019). We Analyzed 912 Million Blog Posts. Here's What We Learned About Content Marketing
- Chartbeat (2025). How to Increase Return Visits on News Websites
- Content Marketing Institute (2025). B2B Content and Marketing Trends: Insights for 2026
- Content Marketing Institute (2025). B2B Research Finds Winning Marketing Teams Build Fundamentals
- Contentsquare (2026). Benchmarks: What Does Engagement Look Like in 2026?
- Contentsquare (2026). How Digital Traffic is Changing in 2026 And What to Do About It
- Fractl (2026). Content Decay: When Does Content Peak and Die?
- Ghost (2026). Ghost: The best open source blog & newsletter platform
- Google (2026). AdSense revenue share - Google AdSense Help
- Graphite (2026). AI Now Writes as Many Online Articles as Humans
- Graphite (2025). How Does AI-Generated Content Perform in Search and Answer Engines?
- HubSpot (2026). 2026 Marketing Statistics, Trends, & Data
- HubSpot (2015). The Blogging Tactic No One Is Talking About: Optimizing the Past
- Medium (2026). About Medium
- Nielsen Norman Group (2018). Scrolling and Attention
- Nielsen Norman Group (2011). How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages?
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