As a digital marketer, there’s a decent chance your relationship with Google in recent years hasn’t been all rainbows and Position One rankings.
Major algorithm updates, the rollout of AI Overviews, Reddit’s growing presence on the SERPs, and the evolution of SEO best practices have been enough to give the most seasoned SEOs and content marketers whiplash. But one thing has stayed consistent: Helpful, high-quality content still rules.
We teamed up with Wynter to create a 2025 content marketing trends report. Wynter helped us to poll 272 managers and directors in the content marketing and SEO space. We asked over 20 questions about their plans for content strategy, AI, and budget in 2025 to understand where the future of content marketing is heading. Read on for our findings, including strategies to thrive in this year’s organic search landscape.
Key Takeaways:
- There are more big spenders in 2025, with 11.3% of content marketers planning to invest over $45,000 per month in content marketing this year — up from 4.1% in 2024.
- About two-thirds (66.5%) of content marketers aren’t confident about where to allocate their resources.
- AI usage may correlate with success, with only 21.5% of content marketers who use AI claim that their strategy is underperforming, compared to 36.2% of those who don’t.
- The top two frustrations among content marketers in 2025 are: getting content to rank (77.6%) and meeting user intent/search intent (70.6%). Putting E-E-A-T at the heart of your strategy can be the solution to both.
- Reported traffic is up, with 62.8% of content marketers seeing growth between 2024 and 2025.
- Manual link building is down, with only 21.4% of link builders considering it their main strategy compared to 38.2% in 2024.
- Content Marketing is Alive and Well
- Low Confidence in Resource Usage
- AI Use and Content Success
- Zero-Click Marketing Is on the Rise
- E-E-A-T Is a Must
- Interest in Link Building is Falling
- Greater Confidence in B2C Strategy
- Interactive Content is Less Common
1. Content Marketing Is Alive and Well
To start, we used two metrics to evaluate 2025’s outlook for content marketing: Site traffic and content marketing budgets. Here’s what we found.
Reported Traffic Is Up
When Google first announced Search Generative Experience (SGE) in May 2023, digital marketers everywhere were preparing for the equivalent of a traffic apocalypse.
Then came the real deal in May 2024: AI Overviews. Has this feature impacted how Google search works? Sure. Was that impact lethal to traffic for businesses’ websites? Let’s turn to the data for the answer.
We asked content marketers how their traffic has been faring YoY, and the results were overwhelmingly positive.
62.8% of content marketers reported traffic growth YoY and 36.4% reported a decline, with most of both cohorts seeing moderate changes (1%-24%), as opposed to drastic ones (25%+).
Data from HubSpot corroborates this claim: 43% of web analysts reported an increase in YoY web traffic for their primary website in 2024, with only 14% reporting a decrease.
Granted, the SEO landscape was in quite a bit of flux toward the end of 2024, so we may see these numbers shift as we enter 2025.
Content Marketing Budgets Are Also Up
We collected 2025 budget data to find out how much teams are investing in content marketing this year.
Our data confirms investment in content marketing across industries remains strong:
88.2% claimed their content marketing budgets will increase or stay the same between 2024 and 2025.
While there’s a slight uptick in those reporting a budget up to just $5,000 per month in 2025, there’s a more impressive leap in those planning to invest over $45,000 per month in content marketing this year — from 4.1% in 2024 to 11.4% in 2025.
We also noticed a 13% YoY decline in high-spending content marketers ($35,000+ monthly budgets) who claim that they operate in “very” or “hyper-competitive” industries.
This indicates that industry competition matters less and less when deciding to invest heavily in content marketing. Even those companies that are just moderately competitive are choosing to invest the big bucks into their content.
2. Two-Thirds of Content Marketers Don’t Feel Confident About Resource Allocation
When asked about their biggest frustrations working in SEO and content marketing, the top concerns selected by content marketers were:
- 77.6%: Getting content to rank
- 70.6%: Meeting user intent/search intent
- 66.5%: Knowing where to put marketing resources
- 41.9%: Finding good writers
- 31.6%: Reducing page bounce rates
- 28.3%: Finding high-quality SEO agencies
This year, resource allocation rivaled the concerns of content ranking and meeting user intent.
This frustration should come as no surprise, as last year, “measuring ROI” was cited as the #1 most common challenge content marketers face when creating content.
Outsourcing Support Is Still Prevalent
While proper funding allocation between marketing efforts like content writing, web design, technical SEO, and link building may be a key challenge, our data suggests many content marketers are already taking steps to innovate and support their content creation processes through outside help.
In 2025, 40% of content marketers report outsourcing at least a quarter of their content budgets.
Despite a slight decline from 45.9% reporting the same in 2024, it’s clear that content marketers are still strategically leveraging out-of-house talent to support content marketing efforts.
AI Tool Usage Is Up
One way teams are looking to increase efficiency is through AI tool usage. In 2025, 90% of content marketers plan to use AI to support content marketing efforts — up from 83.2% in 2024 and 64.7% in 2023. This is consistent across all industries, including B2B and B2C.
3. Those Who Use AI for Content Creation Are More Successful
Whether we love it, hate it, or have very mixed opinions about it, AI is here to stay.
Of the content marketers actively using these tools to support their content marketing efforts at the end of 2024, 99.6% plan to continue doing so in 2025.
Pro tip: Experiment with AI prompts and start an AI prompt library with those that prove helpful to your content marketing processes. Regularly revisit prompts, tweak them, and add more to your list as you go.
Our data shows that this commitment to AI is warranted. Not even one-quarter (21.5%) of content marketers who use AI to support their content marketing efforts claim that their strategy is underperforming, whereas 36.2% of those who don’t use AI say the same.
When asked which AI tools content marketers feel are most reliable and trustworthy for assisting with content marketing, ChatGPT was the reigning champ with a 77.9% selection rate — a more than 50% lead on the next most popular option, Claude.
Of course, familiarity bias may be at play. We may very well see the others listed, or even some of those mentioned so infrequently they fall into “Other” (Copilot, Jasper, Writer.ai, etc.) rise in popularity as teams continue to readily embrace and explore AI solutions, and those solutions continue innovating.
That said, the last thing you should do is throw AI-generated content at your site and hope it sticks. These tools spit out language based on the patterns they see in the data they consume, so they can’t accurately embody the brand style that sets you apart from your competitors.
As a result, AI-generated writing and outputs often:
- Lack the creativity that makes content shine (and pulls in leads): Personal narratives and touches drive users.
- Contain bias: Responsible oversight requires involving team members with diverse backgrounds and perspectives in the review and feedback process.
Focus AI content marketing on streamlining the content creation process (and always under the supervision of a human to make improvements) by:
- Identifying trending or popular topics you should include in your strategy
- Comparing your content to a competitor’s to find content gaps
- Determining what sections to include in an outline
- Catching grammar and spelling mistakes
- Helping to identify trends in data
- Summarizing long-form content or videos into digestible bullets
Here’s a quick look at how content marketers are using AI to support efforts in 2025:
4. Zero-Click Marketing Is on the Rise
Remember what we said about organic traffic being up YoY? Don’t panic, but that likely won’t last forever.
Recent data published by Sparktoro’s Rand Fishkin confirms that searches do not equate to clicks nowadays — 58.5% of all U.S. Google searches can be considered “zero-click,” meaning users either end their session after searching the query (without clicking any results) or immediately search another query. That means only 41.5% of Google searches result in a click.
And content marketers only expect clicks to decline further in the coming years. According to our survey data, 65.8% of content marketers believe traffic will decrease over the next five years.
Digging into potential causes of this belief, we can’t ignore that over two-thirds (36.4%) of content marketers reported a decline in traffic between 2024 and 2025 with the rollout of AI Overviews and AI tools.
This concern may also correlate with an increasing perception of industry competition YoY.
Whereas only 54.7% of content marketers identified their industry as hyper-competitive or very competitive in 2024, 66.5% said the same in 2025.
Another explanation, broken down by Rand in his 5-Minute Whiteboard on zero-click marketing, is that big tech and social media platforms actively de-prioritize non-native content to keep traffic on their platforms.
So, how can content marketers survive in an internet landscape dominated by tech giants that don’t want to send traffic to your site?
Practice zero-click marketing.
This concept might short-circuit our “traditional SEO” wiring because it requires us to rethink the content we create and how we promote it. It’s about shifting our primary focus from keyword optimization and SERP alignment to our audiences and their needs—and meeting those needs quickly and effectively.
That teaser you want to share on social media about the “secret sauce” of using AI tools, which will make your readers’ lives infinitely easier — just a click away? Remove the friction. Remove the click.
Deliver the secret sauce now, and trust that by doing so, you’re making fans who will follow you, sign up for your newsletter, regularly visit your website, and ultimately seek out and engage with your content.
5. E-E-A-T Is No Longer a Nice-To-Have — It’s a Must
At this point, every seasoned content marketer should at least be familiar with E-E-A-T: Google’s acronym for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
In a nutshell, it represents Google’s commitment to rewarding content that comes from those qualified to create it — those who have tangible experience and expertise in a certain area and, therefore, create the most helpful content for users in that niche.
While in the early days of SEO, E-E-A-T was just the cherry on top of keyword-optimized content, Google’s 2024 core updates proved that’s no longer the case. It’s now the foundation of good content marketing, and prioritizing E-E-A-T could be the difference between ranking Page One for all your highest-priority keywords and having those rankings stripped from you in Google’s next core update.
Content marketers everywhere feel the impact of this shift in the SEO force — perhaps the most visible being Reddit’s rise in the SERPs following their $60 million deal with Google. If you felt there wasn’t enough proof that Google adores user-generated content that real, experienced humans have upvoted, this should be all you need.
Let’s look at another case study. I’ll assume you’re all familiar with Forbes: A global media powerhouse that the world of SEO (until recently) largely perceived as unbreakably authoritative and capable of ranking for virtually any business and lifestyle topic you can imagine.
Well, following Google’s November 2024 Core Update, in just one month, Forbes lost nearly one-third (29.2%) of its traffic — a nosedive to levels that hadn’t been seen since December 2022.
While many SEOs and marketers cheered that the wicked witch stealing their precious rankings is dead, this penalization sent a harrowing message to the SEO community: Google takes E-E-A-T very seriously, and nobody is immune — not even Forbes.
So what can you do, apart from “not be like Forbes”?
Well, you can be like Zapier.
Their traffic trajectory following the November 2024 Core update tells a very different story.
The reality is that Zapier embodies E-E-A-T. The blog’s writers each have their own dedicated bios listing their credentials and expertise and write using a first-person, authentic human yet still authoritative voice.
All of Zapier’s app roundup posts also contain a methodology boilerplate specifying the time investment, due diligence, and expert input that goes into each post.
Plus, as a tool used to integrate software (including B2B) and build automations, Zapier is considered a reputable source to cover general business and software topics, opening the door to vast content opportunities.
Check out our case study on Zapier to learn how we supported their exponential traffic growth since the start of our partnership in March 2022.
With two-thirds of content marketers claiming their industry is hyper-competitive or very competitive and Google Core updates repeatedly prioritizing helpful and experience-backed content, now is the time to put E-E-A-T at the heart of your content strategy.
6. Interest in Link Building Is Falling
Remember the days when links from mid-authority mommy blogs were considered a goldmine for any B2C company website’s SEO? I’m afraid that those days are over.
Our data shows that content marketers are placing link building on the back burner this year, considerably more than last year.
Whereas 73.3% of content marketers claimed that link building had a very or somewhat prominent role in their content strategies in 2024, that number is down to 53.3% in 2025.
The number of respondents who claimed that link building is “not at all prominent” also more than doubled YoY, from 5.5% in 2024 to 11.8% in 2025.
Links are still a ranking factor and directly contribute to a site’s domain authority, but the way Google values links has changed, and your strategy needs to change with it. Here’s how:
- Links need to be relevant: A site’s domain authority alone is no longer enough to drive the link juice that’ll impact your authority and rankings. Rather, the sites linking back to you need to be relevant to your brand.
- Link-building strategies that work look different: Of those who plan to focus at all on link building in 2025, only 21.4% claim manual outreach is their main strategy — down from 38.2% in 2024.
A far greater proportion of link-focused content marketers are relying on organic link building and holistic digital PR.
In most established industries, we’ve found that these strategies often result in links that outpace those generated by traditional manual outreach — so much so that in 2022, we stopped doing most of our manual outreach. However, organic link building is only successful when you have the following in place:
- High-quality content that attracts links (e.g., surveys, data studies, trends reports, templates, etc.)
- An internal linking strategy that prioritizes organic link generators
- 2%-5% of all homepage links directing to the content hub from the top navigation and footer
- A curated content library that links to 15+ posts on the content hub
Without these in place, you’ll struggle to get links organically at your desired rate.
Read all about our product-led digital PR strategy and how we’re using it to make the most of first-party data to drive high-quality traffic and links to our clients’ content at scale.
7. B2C Marketers Are More Confident in their Strategies Than Those in B2B
Overall confidence in content marketing strategy is down 2.3% YoY, with a notable difference between B2C and B2B.
Success is significantly higher among B2C than B2B professionals, with 43.3% of B2C content marketers reporting strategy success compared to B2B’s 32%.
While B2C marketers were also more confident than B2B in 2024, the gap in confidence levels between them widened YoY.
This speaks to the challenging nature of B2B content marketing. Having a more niche audience means reach can be a challenge, and expectations for thought leadership and E-E-A-T are high.
We were also curious if content spending correlated with perceived success since there were significantly more low-spending content marketers (those paying under $1,000 per piece of content) in 2025 (64.3%) than in 2024 (48.3%).
The verdict: Not really.
We saw a 9% increase in low-performing low-spenders (those spending under $1,000 per piece of content) and a 15.5% decrease in high-performing high-spenders (those spending over $1,000 per piece of content) between 2024 and 2025.
Content costs aside, Google’s many Core Updates and launch of AI Overviews in 2024 could also explain a decline in overall confidence YoY.
8. Interactive Content Isn’t as Common
It wouldn’t be an SEO and content marketing trends report without speaking to content creation trends.
Investment in interactive content correlates with perceived content marketing strategy success.
In fact, 44.4% of those leveraging interactives claim their content strategy is mildly or very successful, compared to 39.9% of those who don’t invest in interactives claiming the same.
That said, interactive content is a less common strategy than it was last year.
36.4% of content marketers reported creating interactive content at the start of 2025 compared to 62.3% in 2024.
This trend correlates with content marketers spending less per piece of content in 2025 (less than one-half spending under $1,000 per piece of content on average in 2024, compared to 2025’s 64.3%). Naturally, interactive content is bound to be more expensive.
With Google prioritizing E-E-A-T and helpful content above all else, teams may want to begin investing in interactive content once again — particularly for high-priority projects that could benefit from a leveled-up user experience.
Methodology
We partnered with Wynter to send the survey to 150 SEO professionals, content marketing managers, content leads, directors of content, and other content marketing experts in their database.
We also shared the survey with our newsletter subscribers and social media followers to get an additional 122 responses from our audience to target content marketers and thought leaders in the industry, for a total of 272 survey respondents across B2B and B2C businesses in the SaaS, health and wellness, online media/publishing, e-commerce, and finance industries.
Partner With Siege Media To Stay Ahead of Content Marketing Trends Into 2025 and Beyond
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the above SEO and content marketing trends, it’s that the landscape is becoming increasingly complex. It’s no wonder 83% of content marketers are outsourcing at least some of their content marketing strategy — help from world-renowned content marketing agencies can help you stay afloat.
At Siege Media, we can help you put these trends into motion, elevating your content marketing strategy through data-driven insight and creating unparalleled content focused on your customer. The results speak for themselves. Reach out today to learn how we can help you reach your content marketing goals in 2025.
