The news: Content marketers are seeing poor performance from their blogs, and while AI search engines aren’t helping, the sneaky culprit is poor publishing strategies, per Orbit Media.

Just 13.9% of global content marketers surveyed by Orbit said their blog is driving strong results—down from 21% last year—and 18.9% said they didn’t know if their blog was driving strong results.

A deeper look into marketers’ practices found that:

• Guest blogging is down 29% YoY, publishing original research dropped 24%, and influencer collaborations are down 22%—despite each of these having strong correlations with positive results.
• 89% of content marketers promote their work via social media, despite it having a low correlation with positive results, while just 7% promote blog content through influencer partners, which has the highest percentage of positive results.
• 42% of content marketers measure traffic, which has a low correlation with positive results, while just 12% measure visibility (including in AI search), which has a higher incidence of positive results.

What it means: Marketers are undermining their blogs at a time when taking proper care of organic content is more important than ever—rich in information, primary-sourced, and highly readable, blog content is prime material for AI search engines, making it an important area for brands to focus attention. Savvy brands can turn this visibility into opportunities to drive consumers to their websites.

Yet content marketers aren’t stepping up to the challenge. Instead, many are publishing ineffective content that lacks the depth, originality, and format that AI is looking for. And unevolved reporting methods still prioritize the metrics of a pre-AI search era.

Implications for content marketers: Blogs will be useless if marketers can’t adapt their publishing practices. Now is the time to rise above the sea of slop with high-quality content that AI can’t get anywhere else. This will require marketers to publish more proprietary research to earn credibility, as well as engaging content like videos and creator collaborations to entice consumers to visit websites.

Still, even the best generative engine optimization (GEO) strategies can only do so much, which means marketers will need to pursue content marketing beyond just the blog. HubSpot offers a case study—facing an 80% decline in organic traffic to its blog, the company leaned into additional channels it had slowly been developing, such as a creator program and podcast network, per Search Engine Journal. Its revenues climbed, and now it tracks organic growth through criteria like revenue per visit and AI share of voice rather than traffic.

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