Your Team Is Producing More Content Than Ever. Is Any of It Working?

Something strange happened in marketing last year, and most teams haven't clocked it yet: AI-generated content overtook human-written content for the first time on record. Graphite's research traces the line back to November 2022, when ChatGPT launched, and the trend since then isn't a slope. It's closer to a cliff edge for one line and a rocket for the other.

That alone isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is what teams did with the extra capacity.

Tenfold surveyed 400 senior B2B marketing executives last August. Roughly half said they were producing three to five times more content than they were in 2024. Over that same period, most of those teams had their headcount cut, not grown. And here's the number that should actually stop you: not one of those 400 executives reported cutting content output by more than 10%, even with fewer people to make it.

Ahrefs found something similar from the other direction. Across 879 marketers surveyed in the second half of 2025, the median article output for teams using AI was up around 30%. Teams not using it were closer to 11 or 12 articles. And of 900,000 newly indexed pages Ahrefs tracked, close to 40% were AI-written.

So the volume story is settled. Everyone's producing more, with less. The question nobody's answering with the same confidence is: more of what?

We dug into that question in an OrbitalX webinar, The Future of B2B Marketing Metric: Marketing Per Marketer (MPM), with our co-founders Stuart Dale and James Ford. Here's what came out of it.

The Quality Problem Hiding Behind the Volume Story

LinkedIn's own data on this should worry anyone treating "more content" as a strategy on its own. AI-generated posts are seeing reduced reach and lower click-through than human-led content. Ad sets using AI-generated imagery were pulling in up to 70% fewer clicks. The platforms, in other words, can tell the difference even when your audience can't articulate it, and they're quietly penalizing it.

Which puts most marketing teams in an uncomfortable spot. Leadership wants proof of output. AI makes output cheap. But cheap output that gets buried by the algorithm isn't output at all. It's just cost with extra steps.

This is the gap we built Marketing Per Marketer (MPM) to close.

A metric for the "do more with less" era

MPM is deliberately simple: two scores, calculated per head, over a rolling 90-day window.

Volume - posts per marketer, measuring how much is actually going out the door. 

Quality - engagement per marketer, measuring whether anyone outside the company actually cares.

We strip out likes and comments from employees and internal champions before calculating engagement, because a competitor with 10,000 staff will always out-like you on volume of internal cheerleading alone. What's left is a genuine read on whether the market is responding.

Plot those two numbers against each other and four patterns show up, almost every time:

High impact producers post often and get engaged with often. This is the upper-right quadrant everyone wants to be in, and it's rare, because pushing volume up usually drags quality down with it.

Low output stars post rarely but land hard when they do. Sometimes that's a deliberate strategy, scarcity building anticipation. More often it's an untapped opportunity: the content clearly works, so why isn't there more of it?

Content treadmills post constantly with middling-to-poor engagement. Not automatically a bad place to be. If the trend line is moving right (engagement improving) quarter over quarter, that's a team building the right posting muscle and still sharpening its message. If the trend line is flat, it's a warning that volume has become the goal instead of the method.

Quiet laggards are under on both counts. There's no dressing this one up. If you're here, the fix is to get help unlocking both axes at once, not to pick one and hope the other follows.

What the best teams are actually doing differently

We ran MPM analysis against Clay, Snowflake, and Datadog — three very different businesses, all performing well by different routes, none of them each other's direct competitor. The value isn't in ranking them against each other. It's in seeing how differently "good" can look.

Clay is the only one of the three running a deliberate humor strategy in its content, and it shows up roughly four times as often as even their partner content. That's not an accident. B2B marketing has spent two decades trying to look serious, and Clay is betting that the businesses willing to be genuinely funny are the ones people remember and keep scrolling for. Given how fast the company has grown, it's a bet that appears to be paying off.

Snowflake, by contrast, is almost entirely a video operation, somewhere around 80-90% of their LinkedIn output comes from webinars and event recordings. Datadog leans hardest on customer stories, publishing more of them, proportionally, than either of the other two, even outpacing their own partner content.

None of these is "the answer." They're three different bets on where attention actually lives. What MPM gives you isn't a verdict — it's a place to start asking better questions about your own content mix. Are you leaning on customer proof? Underusing video? Playing it too safe when a competitor's humor is clearly working harder than your case studies?

The stakes for 2026

Marketing headcount isn't coming back to pre-AI levels anytime soon. The default response (lean on AI to fill the gap) is already happening at scale, and the LinkedIn engagement data suggests a lot of that content is landing flat. Producing more without checking whether it's working isn't efficiency. It's just contributing to the pile of content nobody's reading.

MPM won't write better posts for you. What it does is give you and your leadership team a shared, honest number for whether "doing more with less" is actually working, or just looking busy.

We walked through this in full detail recently, including a live breakdown of the Clay, Snowflake, and Datadog data, our own MPM scores against direct competitors, and how the report translates into website traffic and conversion signals. If you want the complete picture and a look at how your own numbers might stack up, the full session is worth your time.

Watch the full webinar recording →https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NoDoFWLzdc