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Blog > AI in Marketing: How Marketers Are Using AI in 2026
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Marketers are leaning heavily on AI to streamline processes, improve content quality, and free up time. But while adoption is skyrocketing, concerns about ethics, transparency, and overreliance persist.
This report unpacks how AI is being used in marketing today, which tools are leading the way, and what challenges lie ahead.
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In a very short span of time, generative AI has found widespread adoption in marketing.
84% of marketing teams claim to use at least one AI tool regularly in 2026.
This is a number that’s been steadily climbing over the past few years, from 61% in 2024 to 73% in 2025.
PR professionals are also enthusiastic about AI technology, with adoption tripling from 28% in 2023 to 75% in 2026.
However, this adoption has leveled off in 2026, currently standing at 76%.
This is a natural progression as the hype surrounding AI starts to settle for professionals, and they’ve had time to make up their minds about their preferences.
Those who adopted AI continue to do so, while those who are opposed to it remain opposed.
The number of professionals who are unsure about using AI workflows in their PR jobs or have an anti-AI stance remains largely unchanged from last year at 6% and 7%, respectively.
Source: Muck Rack, Presenc AI
Not surprisingly, content is still the king when it comes to marketing use cases of generative AI, with 72% of marketers using it for content creation.
But other use cases are also catching up, primarily data analysis and personalization, with 68% and 61% adoption, respectively.
That said, the biggest upward trend in AI adoption over the past 2 years is in teams using it for SEO/GEO (52%) and AI visibility monitoring(41%).
Here’s a full breakdown of popular AI marketing use cases:
When it comes to content creation, written content is the favorite type of content that marketers generate with AI at 95%.
Images are also quite popular with as much as 67% of marketers who use AI-generated content relying on LLMs for images.
Attitudes about video generation are quite intriguing.
37% are using AI to generate video, but that's not the whole story.
Video isn't the most popular type of content for marketers to produce. Yet, 74% of them express a desire to learn high-quality video generation with AI.
This makes sense, considering that producing videos with AI that match a person's vision satisfactorily is quite hard and hit-or-miss.
Among PR professionals, editing and refinement is the most popular use case, with 86% of them using it for this purpose.
About 3 in 4 use it for research and insights, and the same number use it for writing and content creation.
There’s an interesting shift here compared to last year.
The same survey from 2025 found editing and refinement to be the 3rd most popular use case for PR professionals, at 70%.
That’s a 16% increase in just 1 year, displacing content generation from the top use case to the third now in 2026.
One likely explanation is the oversaturation of the web with AI-generated content and its blinding effect on consumers, as it flattens unique brand voices.
Instead of running to AI for pure generated content, professionals are relying more on editing and refining text with AI.
Interestingly, professionals who do use AI-generated content are less likely to do an extensive edit of the AI output in 2026 than in previous years.
Although almost every person in the survey claimed they edit AI output, the proportion editing or refining only a few paragraphs has increased from 30% in 2024 to 44% in 2026.
In short, while people are slightly less likely to use AI for PR content than before, when they do use AI content, they don’t edit the generated text as extensively as they did before.
77% of PR pros brainstorm with AI at least once a week, underlining the value of this technology for developing ideas and validating experiments.
Source: Muck Rack, Presenc AI
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AI tools are plentiful today, but for serious professional use, marketers have a few strong preferences, with ChatGPT leading at 81%.
Claude and Gemini follow with adoption at 65% and 60%, respectively.
Outside of these three, figures fall sharply. Microsoft Copilot stands at 26%, while other tools like Meta and Grok barely make it into the fray.
Historically, platform usage has changed significantly. ChatGPT peaked at 90% in 2025 before declining to 81% in 2026.
While ChatGPT’s prevalence has been topsy-turvy, Claude has been moving in one direction only: up and very rapidly at that.
Claude has leaped from 18% in 2024 to 65% today.
Gemini is also consistently growing more popular among marketers, going from 33% to 60% in a span of two years.
Among the big AI brands, Microsoft Copilot stands out (for the wrong reasons) for stagnating at 26% adoption, a point from which it’s barely moved since 2024.
Source: Social Media Examiner
Marketers view the impact of AI on their work favorably for the most part.
A recent HubSpot survey shows that 68% of marketers feel that AI frees up time for more important strategic tasks, such as building relationships with customers.
PR professionals credit AI for significant time savings in editing, content creation, and research tasks.
In PR, 93% feel AI speeds up their processes and 82% think it increases quality.
The actual amount of time saved is hard to quantify. It varies by sector, companies, and individuals.
Besides, research data might disagree with self-reported surveys.
For instance, Goldman Sachs reports that companies using ChatGPT enterprise accounts save about 40 to 60 minutes a day, or about 3 to 5 hours a week.
This disagrees strongly with HubSpot’s finding that 67% of marketing teams claimed to be saving about 10 or more hours every week.
But obsessing over the exact hours saved is a minor detail and matters less in the grand scheme of things.
That’s because most surveys and research do agree that time is being saved meaningfully, so the productivity value of AI is clear.
Exploding Topics recently conducted our own research about how marketers are using AI. We found that approximately 6 in 10 marketing stacks have increased in size over the past year, with 94.2% of marketing departments with the biggest budgets replacing some of their existing tools with AI.
Furthermore, 82.36% of marketing teams that are doubling down on AI are also increasing their hiring. 71.52% of marketing departments are actively trying to influence AI responses, with 36.61% of decision-makers dedicating their largest budget increases to AI optimization (AIO).
Our findings show that the best marketing teams don't want to get left behind. They're adopting, they're adapting, and they're still managing to continue hiring.
Source: Exploding Topics, HubSpot, Fortune, Muck Rack
Although adoption is rapidly increasing every year, formal policies for AI use in companies have struggled to catch up.
That said, it’s a situation that’s improving. Muck Rack’s survey from 2024 found only 21% of PR professionals had an AI use case policy.
But that number has jumped to 51% in 2026, more than doubling in two years.
While the trend is moving in the right direction, corporate readiness and formal policies still have a lot of ground to cover if companies want to match the pace of adoption with official guidelines to support it.
Training for AI use is also making dramatic progress. About 43% say their company now offers AI training, compared to only 21% in 2024.
Still, 37% say they receive no training at work. This is down from 50% in 2024 and 40% in 2025, but the proportion has only come by three points between 2025 and 2026.
Despite steady progress in training and AI use policies, it’s evident that companies aren’t moving fast enough to offer training and establish policies to guide and enable workers in using AI.
Source: Muck Rack
On the one hand, marketing and PR professionals view the impact of AI on their work positively.
But on the other hand, many lingering fears and concerns about AI persist.
An alarming 77% in PR think that the newer hires overrely on AI and lack a deep understanding of the profession and the industry they need to excel.
Another 63% think PR people use AI output with no scrutiny, lowering the quality of PR messaging and conversations.
Similarly, 61% feel that content will not be as original or creative as it could without AI use.
These are valid concerns that emphasize the conundrum of using AI tools.
The efficiency gains from AI are impossible to ignore.
At the same time, reliance on AI harms creativity that comes from experience and intuition.
When everyone uses the same tools prone to the same patterns of content, it’s that much harder to attain differentiation that’s essential in marketing and PR.
Another survey found that accuracy and reliability of generated content is among the top concerns for 78% of the marketers.
Data privacy also remains high on the list of concerns marketers have, with 77% agreeing this to be so.
Many professionals in marketing and PR also feel that effective use of AI demands certain skills.
85% think good prompt writing is an important skill to get the most value out of AI.
Crucially, 71% think that ethical decision-making is vital, indicating that human involvement and critical thinking can’t be suspended completely to work effectively with AI.
Source: Muck Rack, Social Media Examiner
AI is now deeply embedded in many professional workflows. And for marketing professionals, generative AI use is widespread and expanding, handling a broader set of tasks than ever.
As more marketers focus on SEO/GEO applications of AI and monitoring AI visibility, the need for tools like Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit is growing faster than ever.
These tools allow you to see exactly how your brand is performing online, powered by real-time AI insights.
Use real-time topic data to create content that resonates and brings results.
Exploding Topics is owned by Semrush. Our mission is to provide accurate data and expert insights on emerging trends. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.
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Written By
Fabio Duarte
Research Associate
Fabio is a research associate at Exploding Topics. Since 2021, Fabio has researched, written, and edited articles for the Explo… Read more
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