[Research Round-Up] New Insights on Blog Performance and Blogging Practices

Source:  Orbit Media Studios

(This month's Research Round-Up discusses some of the major findings in Orbit Media's 2026 survey regarding blog performance and blogging practices. The 2026 survey reveals that marketers' confidence in the performance of their blogs has declined substantially compared to last year. Orbit Media's discussion of the 2026 survey results provides one explanation for the sharp decrease in marketer confidence.)

Last month, Andy Crestodina and the team at Orbit Media Studios released the findings of their 2026 blogger research study. The findings were published in this post at the Orbit Media blog. 

The 2026 study consisted of a survey of 1,042 "content marketers." The blog post did not provide detailed information regarding the demographics of the survey respondents or indicate when the survey was conducted.

Orbit Media has been conducting this research since 2014, so they can provide a valuable perspective on how blog performance and blogging practices have evolved over the past 12 years.

Confidence in Blog Performance Declines

The chart at the beginning of this post shows the "headline" findings of the 2026 Orbit Media survey.

• Only 13.9% of the survey respondents said their blog "delivers strong results." That was six percentage points below the previous 12-year low.

• Meanwhile, 18.9% of the respondents said, "I don't know if the blog delivers results." The percentage of respondents expressing this view was at an all-time 12-year high.

In his post describing the survey results, Andy Crestodina, the Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Orbit Media noted that for the preceding ten years, between 20% and 30% of Orbit's survey respondents had said their blog delivers strong results, while only 9% to 14% of the respondents had indicated they didn't know how well their blog was working.

So, the 2026 survey results represent a significant change. As Crestodina observed, "Clearly, something happened."

What Explains the Decline in Confidence

The Orbit Media survey asked participants several questions about their blogging strategies and practices. The researchers then identified which strategies and practices were correlated with strong performance and which were correlated with weak performance.

For example, they found that the following strategies and practices were correlated with strong blog performance.

• Collaborating with influencers
• Using paid content promotion
• Frequent use of analytics
• Keyword research
• Publishing original research
• Using a formal editing process

Conversely, the following strategies and practices were correlated with poor blog performance.

• Publishing less visual content (visuals per post)
• Never researching keywords
• Publishing monthly or less
• Replacing human editors with AI

The Orbit Media research team then examined how the use of these strategies and practices by survey respondents had changed since 2016. Their analysis revealed that the use of all of the strategies and practices correlated with strong performance had declined, while the use of all the strategies and practices correlated with poor blog performance had increased. The following chart shows the results of this analysis.

Source:  Orbit Media Studios

This analysis led the Orbit Media researchers to conclude that the decline in marketer confidence about blog performance has occurred because the surveyed content marketers are using the most effective blog strategies less frequently and the least effective strategies and practices more frequently.

The Use and Impact of AI

Nearly every research study relating to marketing that I've reviewed over the past three years has addressed artificial intelligence in some way, and Orbit Media's 2026 blogging research is no exception.

The Orbit Media research team asked survey participants about nine blogging-related use cases for AI, and the survey produced four significant findings.

• Ninety-two percent (92%) of the survey respondents reported using AI in their blogging process.

• The surveyed content marketers reported using AI for fewer types of tasks. The percentage of survey respondents who said they are using AI declined for eight of the nine AI use cases identified in the survey, compared to the 2025 survey data.

• None of the AI use cases identified in the 2026 survey were correlated with blog performance.

• Users and non-users of AI were equally likely to say their blog produced strong results. However, non-users of AI were much more likely than AI users to say their blog produced disappointing results. As Andy Crestodina wrote in his blog post, "Using AI doesn't make you more likely to outperform. But not using AI appears to make you more likely to underperform."