Every year the same ritual plays out: a fresh batch of marketing statistics lands, everyone skims the headline numbers, and most of it is forgotten within a week. That’s a shame, because buried in this year’s data is a genuinely useful picture of where budgets, attention and search behaviour are all heading — and it’s shifting faster than usual.
The short version is that AI has quietly rewired how people find brands, organic search is being squeezed by generative tools, and the channels marketers trust most (blogs, email, short-form video) are still the ones quietly outperforming everything else. Below is what the numbers mean in practice, rather than just a list of figures to skim past.
Organic search is still king, but it’s sharing the throne with AI
Website, blog and SEO work remains the single highest-ROI marketing channel for most businesses, which is exactly why it’s worth protecting rather than treating as a box-ticking exercise. Roughly a third of internet users over 16 now discover new brands and products directly through search engines, according to DataReportal, which tells you that visibility on page one still converts curiosity into custom.
What’s changed is the competition search now faces. Close to a quarter of marketers are actively reworking their SEO approach to account for generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini, and nearly all of them — over 92%, per HubSpot’s State of Marketing research — are either already optimising for AI-powered search or planning to. That’s a meaningful shift, and it’s why answer engine optimisation (AEO) has moved from buzzword to budget line for a growing number of teams. Around 30% of marketers say they’ve already noticed a dip in traditional search traffic as people lean on AI tools for answers instead of clicking through to a website, which makes clear, well-structured, genuinely useful content more important than ever, not less.
Mobile still dominates how people search in the first place. Google alone accounts for over 93% of the global mobile search market according to StatCounter, and most businesses now see mobile devices driving more than half of their annual website traffic. If your site isn’t built mobile-first, you’re fighting an uphill battle before a single keyword is considered.
Blogging hasn’t died — it’s just had to earn its place again
Blog content has quietly climbed back up the priority list. In the latest HubSpot data, blog posts sit among the top five highest-ROI content formats and are one of the formats marketers plan to invest more in during 2026, following closely behind short-form and long-form video. Small businesses in particular report seeing above-average returns from blogging, roughly 23% more likely to see ROI than the average marketer.
Interestingly, posts themselves are getting shorter. Orbit Media’s research puts the average blog post at around 1,350 words in 2025, continuing a multi-year trend towards tighter, more focused writing rather than sprawling, keyword-stuffed essays. That lines up with how people actually read online: they scan for the answer, not the padding. Well-structured headings, clear takeaways and a logical flow now matter more than sheer word count.
AI has also become part of the blogging workflow itself, with around 94% of marketers planning to use it somewhere in their content creation process this year. Used well, it speeds up research and drafting; used badly, it produces exactly the generic, repetitive copy that both readers and search engines are learning to recognise and ignore.
Social media still splits opinion, but the data is clear about where to focus
There are now 5.66 billion social media users worldwide, and the average person spends well over two hours a day scrolling, according to DataReportal’s 2025 Global Overview. Nearly three-quarters of internet users over 16 use social platforms specifically to research brands and products before buying, which makes a scattergun “post everywhere” approach one of the more expensive mistakes a business can make.
Instagram remains the platform marketers rely on most, used by around 70% of them and most frequently cited as delivering the strongest return on investment. Facebook isn’t far behind and continues to drive the largest share of referral traffic of any social network, at roughly 64% according to the same DataReportal report. TikTok, meanwhile, has become the platform most marketers plan to lean into further in 2026, with over half already using it and a third reporting it as one of their highest-performing channels — a remarkable result for a platform that’s still relatively young in marketing terms.
LinkedIn deserves a specific mention for B2B-focused businesses. Its user base has passed 1.2 billion, and usage among marketers jumped by 11 percentage points year on year. Nearly 90% of B2B marketers already use it for lead generation, and the majority say it works.
Video is no longer optional, and shorter is winning
Video marketing statistics tell one of the clearest stories in this year’s data: 91% of businesses now use video as part of their marketing, and short-form video is both the most widely used and the highest-ROI content format marketers report, according to Wyzowl’s annual research. Nearly three-quarters of consumers say they’d rather watch a short video than read about a product, and the preferred length keeps shrinking — most people say 30 to 60 seconds is the sweet spot, with 91% wanting something under two minutes.
This isn’t just a TikTok trend. YouTube Shorts currently records the highest engagement rate of any short-form format, and even LinkedIn — not traditionally thought of as a video platform — has seen video views climb by more than a third. For product-led businesses, explainer-style video carries particular weight: 96% of marketers say video has helped customers understand what they’re actually selling, and a similar share of consumers say watching one influenced a purchase decision.
Email marketing remains a quiet workhorse
It’s easy to overlook email in a conversation dominated by social platforms and AI search, but the numbers don’t support ignoring it. There are now 4.6 billion global email users, and around 75% of marketers plan to maintain or increase their investment in the channel this year, per HubSpot’s data. Segmentation is where the real gains sit: personalised, segmented email campaigns generate roughly 30% more opens and 50% more clicks than generic blasts sent to an entire list.
Personalisation itself has become table stakes rather than a nice-to-have. More than half of marketers now include basic personalisation such as a subscriber’s name, and with average click-through rates hovering around 2.5% across industries, small improvements in targeting tend to move the needle far more than clever subject lines alone.
What this actually means for your strategy
None of this points to abandoning any single channel — it points to being deliberate about where effort goes. Search and blog content remain the foundation because they compound over time and are increasingly the raw material AI tools pull answers from. Short-form video and Instagram continue to offer the strongest immediate ROI for brand visibility. Email quietly converts the people who are already paying attention, provided the list is segmented rather than treated as one audience.
The businesses seeing genuine growth this year aren’t necessarily doing more; they’re doing fewer things properly, backed by data rather than guesswork, and adapting faster to the fact that search itself is being reshaped by AI. That’s really the throughline across every one of these statistics: the fundamentals of good marketing haven’t changed, but the routes customers take to find you have, and it pays to keep watching where they lead.
