Short answer: yes, but only when it has strategic purpose, a distinctive point of view and is structured for both human readers and AI.. Content volume alone no longer earns a commercial return in 2026.
“Our agency keeps producing content but I can’t tie in back to an increase in revenue or improved results”
“Everyone’s flat out creating more content and nobody can explain what it’s adding up to”
“More of our customers are using AI to find solutions like ours, how do we make sure we appear in ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini etc.”
Do any of these sound familiar?
If you’re leading a business in the £5m+ to £50m revenue bracket, chances are you’re already investing in content marketing. You likely have an internal team, a content studio, or an agency creating a variety of blog posts, newsletters, guides, campaigns and social posts. You may even be doing podcasts or venturing out into video.
The challenge is likely that you’re struggling to connect this effort back to leads, revenue or pipeline value, or in a consumer business to customer acquisition, retention or basket value. Is it actually moving the needle?
In 2026, that lack of strategic clarity has become more expensive. AI has not simply made content cheaper and faster to produce. It is also changing how buyers discover, research and shortlist businesses.
Poorly differentiated content now loses two audiences at once. Customers have no incentive to engage with it as it’s interchangeable and the AI systems they increasingly rely on will not cite you.
Both show up as flat commercial returns.
Is YOUR content marketing worth it in 2026?
Content marketing remains an effective channel where it is done with strategic intent.
The problem for most businesses trying to scale their marketing operations with limited resources is that their content is hampered by a lack of strategic purpose, audience clarity and the ability to produce a genuinely different perspective.
The result? Everyone is busy writing, or generating content with AI, but growth isn’t moving. Worse, the lack of clarity over results means there is rarely enough evidence to justify a change of direction, and equally little to support further investment. Businesses slip into months or years of effort with no commercial return to show for it.
AI has made execution dramatically cheaper. That makes strategic judgement more valuable, not less. When almost any business can produce more content, production itself stops being a competitive advantage. The advantage moves upstream: deciding what is worth saying, who needs to hear it, where it should appear, why it matters and what commercial behaviour it should influence. Having a distinct voice delivered in a distinct way becomes the strategic advantage.
Why content marketing often fails to deliver commercial returns
At Open Velocity, we’ve worked with a lot of leadership teams caught in the content busy-ness trap.
The tell-tale signs your content lacks strategic direction:
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- Content is produced without a detailed view of the ICP or target customer. Rather than being curated by a senior marketer sitting across product, sales, marketing and customer service, it is siloed inside the marketing team or the agency with no wider input.
- Everyone involved is focused on short-term tasks, self-imposed to-do lists, content calendars and arbitrary deadlines. Nobody has the authority, or the standing, to challenge the direction of travel.
- The metrics your agency or team are reporting don’t quite connect to commercial value. Traffic, clicks and impressions may all be trending in the right direction, but they aren’t being tied to pipeline in a B2B business, or to acquisition, repeat purchase and lifetime value in a consumer one, and increasingly not to AI visibility either. The bigger issue is that there is no clear rationale for what the content is supposed to achieve and no internal owner senior enough to hold the agency/team to it.
How AI is reshaping content marketing and what it means for CEOs
Three shifts matter here, and they connect directly to our previous writing on the graveyard of the middle.
First, AI search rewards category leaders.
Large language models do not rank pages in the way Google used to.
They filter for who belongs in a category, then cite the small handful of brands that consistently appear as the canonical answer across authoritative sources.
This is as true for a challenger consumer brand as it is for a B2B software business.
In both cases, if you sit in the undifferentiated middle of your category, you are not just harder to choose, you are structurally invisible to the systems now mediating buyer research. The graveyard of the middle problem we have been describing for the last year has become an AI visibility problem too. Content is one way of providing clear information about how you are different from everyone else.
Second, content is now machine infrastructure, not just for persuading humans.
AI agents do not browse your site the way a prospect does. They extract facts, verify claims, and synthesise answers.
Your website has become the main place where LLMs and agents understand your business, your product, your pricing and your credibility. That changes what “good content” looks like. It needs to add information gain, meaning something new and specific that is not already said better elsewhere, and it needs to be structured into modular, self-contained sections that AI systems can pull from cleanly.
Third, the new measure of return is share of model, not share of voice.
The relevant question is what percentage of the priority questions your customers ask an AI, your brand shows up in the answer to. AI-influenced visits are smaller in volume than the traffic you used to chase, but higher in intent. The users who arrive have already been pre-qualified by the model. Unlinked mentions on Reddit, YouTube, review sites, analyst pages and industry publications now do real work for that visibility, which means the content strategy is also a source strategy.
None of this makes content less worth doing. It makes undifferentiated content actively harmful, because it consumes budget, occupies the team, and signals to the machine layer that you have nothing distinctive to say.
For your content strategy, this changes the priorities. You need to make sure you have a clearer point of view, evidence of expertise your competitors cannot easily copy and content built around the questions your customers are genuinely asking rather than the keywords they might type.
Where content marketing often isn’t the answer
There are situations where content is not the right lever. At the smaller end, businesses still shaping their proposition or their audience usually have faster, more direct routes to reach them. For larger businesses, growth bottlenecks may sit somewhere content simply cannot reach, in pricing, product, distribution, sales capacity, or the operating model itself. And in some markets, customers are not persuaded by content at any meaningful stage of their journey.
These scenarios are a useful reminder that content is not always the right answer, not always the only answer and not always the best answer, whatever the agency and much of the content industry will tell you.
Your channel mix, whether that includes content and on what channels, should be informed by your own strengths and by customer behaviour, who and what influences them, where they spend their time, and most pragmatically, what actually drives revenue.
Unsure of whether your content marketing is working?
If you’re questioning the value of your content efforts the most useful thing you can do is not brief in more content. Your marketing team needs to stop, and have a different conversation.
Have it at leadership level and have it before the next quarter’s plan lands on your desk. What is content actually meant to do for this business, do we have evidence it is driving any outcomes and would we invest in it with fresh eyes today?
If having that conversation internally is hard, a marketing audit is often the quickest way to get an independent read on where the value is being created and where it isn’t. It will also give you a read on whether you have the strategic foundations in place to make content work for your business.
