Ahrefs surveyed 301 marketers and found Claude, at 83 percent, is now the most-used AI tool for content, ahead of ChatGPT and Gemini

Claude has passed ChatGPT and Gemini to become the most used AI tool for content marketing. Ahrefs surveyed 301 marketers for its second annual AI content report, published on 30 September, and 83 percent of respondents who use AI said they use Claude. ChatGPT was second at 76 percent, and Gemini third at 58 percent. Claude Cowork was named by 42 percent, Claude Code by 37 percent, and Codex by 13 percent. Respondents could pick more than one tool.

Ahrefs says AI use in content creation is close to universal in its sample. 93 percent, or 280 of 301 respondents, use AI to create or help create content. Last year the figure was 87 percent. 85 percent said they produce content faster with AI. On Ahrefs's scale, 48 percent picked the "much quicker" answer and 37 percent picked the smaller speed-up option, while 2.5 percent said AI had slowed them down.

What people trust and what they hide

The trust figures are the pair worth quoting to a team debating an AI content pipeline. 66 percent said they only trust AI-generated content if a human reviews it first. Only 2.7 percent said they trust AI-generated content with no review at all. 56 percent said human-written content is still better quality than their AI content, and 23 percent called the human writing "way better".

The disclosure figures are the other pair. 78 percent of marketers using AI do not tell website visitors that AI helped write the page. 22 percent openly disclose it, up from 16 percent in the 2025 survey.

The biggest change year on year

Ahrefs flags one year on year change as the biggest: marketers using AI to check the quality of other AI content doubled, from 14 percent in 2025 to 29 percent in 2026. Most of the checking is still manual, but the share of respondents who do not check AI output at all fell.

Two more figures round out the picture. 61 percent said their view of AI-generated content has become more positive over the past year, 23 percent much more positive. 7 percent said the content they publish is now primarily "pure" AI, so heavy AI writing is a real practice but not the median case.

The report calls out one split by seniority: 43 percent of founders and business owners said their AI content beats human writing, against 17 percent of junior and mid-level marketers. Ahrefs does not resolve the split, and does not test whether the founders' pages perform differently in search or in AI answer engines.

Ahrefs ran the survey with Glen Allsopp, and the report is its own. Every number here is what the respondents told Ahrefs, and Ahrefs has not published the raw responses.

Source

• Primary source: Ahrefs: 69% of Marketers Are Publishing More AI Content Than Last Year, 30 September 2026