the ai marketer Turns 1 | contentmarketing.ai

October marks one year since the ai marketer began delivering news, tips, tricks, guides and best practices about all things AI in marketing. Since our sister blog (the Brafton Blog) has been doing its thing for a decade and change, growing something new here on the ai marketer has been a fun and rewarding challenge.

The past 365 days (give or take) of researching, writing, publishing and sharing content on the ai marketer has taught us a lot about the state of the marketing industry, AI tools and user preferences, blogging, channel diversity and more.

Here are a few lessons we’ve learned and some insights about the content that has resonated with our readers the most.

What We’ve Learned About AI, Blogging and Content Creation

I’ll call these lessons the Big Three; the most valuable information our team has learned since launching this blog. They concern using AI for content creation (sometimes yes, other times no); topic ideation, selection and publishing (where does content truly belong?); and finding and growing our audience (where are our ideal readers, and how can we meet them there?).

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Sometimes AI Should Draft Your Content — and Sometimes It Shouldn’t

On a domain that belongs to an AI content marketing tool, it’s no surprise that we use our platform to write, ideate or streamline a selection of blog content. Our team is proud of what we’ve built, and we want to show it off!

That said, we also publish thought leadership and news-led pieces that require a more involved human touch. For those articles, AI can be helpful for research and planning, but it seldom has a larger role in the writing process.

Especially today, it’s important to recognize that AI is not a panacea for your content struggles, and that running a blog (or creating anything substantial) requires a thoughtful, stringent and intentional editorial process to deliver your best quality of work. AI can help you do that, but it cannot wholly do it for you.

The lesson: Know when and how to leverage AI for content creation. Not all content types are created equal, which means they all require a unique approach. AI thrives in structured, formulaic formats such as how-to guides, product descriptions and SEO blogs. However, when the goal is to express a unique perspective, respond to news or tell a deeply human story — and keep it all on the rails — a human editorial team’s voice and judgment are irreplaceable.

Understanding Your Audience and Topic Pillars is Paramount

Before launching the blog, we defined topic pillars and core themes that directly support our expertise. That way, choosing what to write about isn’t a guessing game, but more of a strategy that helps us build authority while speaking directly to what our audience needs (and expects) from us. That’s how you move away from being just another voice and toward becoming a trusted resource.

The lesson: Stay true to your original intent and purpose. Just because an idea lightly touches on a topic you’re keen to explore doesn’t mean it fits the intended focus of your blog. Define your editorial boundaries early — and stick to them — so each channel maintains a clear, consistent identity and satisfies audience expectations.

Reach Expansion Strategy Is Important

Launching and writing a blog for a whole year is both a massive undertaking and an impressive accomplishment. If you’ve recently achieved a similar milestone, congrats!

Equally important to consistency, though, is expanding your reach. Especially early on, how will people find your content? Without a strategy for reach, it can be tough to get eyes on your work.

Here’s how we approached this with the ai marketer:

In the beginning, we promoted the blog launch and each initial article on Brafton’s social media. Having an established industry presence across social platforms was a bonus, but I recognize that most new bloggers won’t have that. Even still, maintaining an organic social posting strategy is usually a good way to expand your readership.
A few months in, we began to feature ai marketer articles in our Saturday email campaign once per month. Email remains our largest traffic driver by far, initiating 85% of sessions.
Next, we launched a contentmarketing.ai-branded white paper and ran a paid LinkedIn campaign to drive awareness and interest in our blog as well as the brand overall.
Finally, we launched the ai marketer weekly — this blog’s very own email newsletter. There, we send a selection of articles from the previous week straight to subscribers’ inboxes.

The lesson: Don’t rely on a single channel to carry your content strategy. A great blog deserves its own ecosystem of social promotion, email distribution, SEO attention and more to help it reach and engage the right audiences. Consistency builds authority, but distribution builds visibility.

How the Industry Has Changed In a Year

By now, everyone knows that AI moves at peregrine falcon pace. Not a bird aficionado? It moves impressively (maybe even concerningly) fast. There’s a near constant pressure to adopt more tools, better tools. It gets tiring quickly. While that hasn’t changed much since things blew up in 2022, a lot about the industry has.

Notable AI in Marketing News From Our Roundup Series

We published our inaugural AI Roundup & Rundown post in November 2024, one month after kicking off the blog. Each month since, we’ve delivered a succinct resource highlighting notable AI in marketing moments.

Here’s a brief look back at select innovations, announcements and news from the past year:

November 2024

The European Union established the world’s first official guidelines for general-purpose AI.
OpenAI released ChatGPT Search.

January 2025

The Trump Administration repealed the Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.

March 2025

OpenAI’s Sam Altman revealed a newly-trained AI model he said was “good at creative writing.”

April 2025

The U.S. introduced a new AI-focused executive order.
Google rolled out AI Overviews to nine additional EU countries.

June 2025

Clashes over using copyrighted data to train AI accelerated.
A PwC study suggested that jobs most easily automated by AI were growing, not shrinking.

August 2025

An MIT study revealed that AI investments netted no measurable returns.
OpenAI released GPT-5 to significant user backlash, stoking conversations of an AI bubble burst.

Key Shifts Since This Time Last Year

A lot has changed in a year:

AI Adoption & Attitudes

AI adoption has risen significantly over the past year. In Q3 2025, 42% of organizations say they’ve deployed at least some AI agents, according to KPMG.

Back in Q3 2024, only 12% reported deployed AI agents.

The public’s view of AI has shifted, too.

Around the time we launched the ai marketer, 35% of the U.S. public had a negative view of how they believe AI will impact their country over the next 20 years. 33% said AI will have an equally positive and negative impact, while just 17% said positive.

Newer data from Spring 2025 suggests changes on all of these fronts. The question here is a bit different (How do people feel about the rise of AI in daily life?), but we can draw some correlations. Among U.S. respondents:

50% were more concerned than excited.
38% were equally concerned and excited.
10% were more excited than concerned.

Although the questions are slightly different (national impact vs. personal), sentiment has skewed more negative over the past year.

Overall, just 16% of global respondents were more excited than concerned about the increasing use of AI in daily life. 42% are equally excited and concerned, while 34% are more concerned. People in the U.S. and Italy are most concerned, with 50% of surveyed residents signaling unease.

Although these survey questions differed in scope and nuance, both signal that:

Concern is rising overall, even as AI use expands.
Optimism is shrinking, indicating unmet expectations or fatigue.

But not everyone is worried. Some countries, like Sweden, Indonesia, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, France, South Korea and others, are more ambivalent about AI, each having a greater share of people who say they’re equally concerned and excited. South Korea is most so, with 61% of people on the fence, and only 16% who say they’re more concerned than excited.

Industry Trends

When the ai marketer went live in 2024, the marketing industry was well beyond the “we’re just testing AI” phase — there was real usage, especially in content creation, personalization and segmentation. That said, many organizations were still figuring out strategy, how to scale, how to measure ROI and how to embed AI thoughtfully into their workflows.

Today, there’s more clarity and familiarity with how AI fits into businesses’ bigger pictures, and more marketers say they’re reaching mature AI stages, according to the 2025 State of Marketing AI Report:

17% of marketers say they’ve achieved their most mature version of AI integration and are actively using it to “reimagine” their jobs.
60% of marketers are actively piloting or scaling AI, with 14% saying they’re achieving widespread adoption across their business.

Some Insights from Our First Year

Now for a little peek behind the curtain. These were our top five performing posts from the past year based on sessions:

Overall, we’ve seen awesome growth, reach and rankings:

134 posts since launch.
108,000+ sessions across blogs.
Ranking for 43 keywords (and counting).
9,500+ backlinks from over 150 referring domains.

Here’s to One Year

Launching the ai marketer on contentmarketing.ai was a natural next step in tune with Brafton’s expertise, evolution and explorations. It’s been an awesome ride so far, covering the latest in AI innovation, industry shifts, marketing use cases and the good and bad of it all.

For year two, we plan to continue building on what we’ve achieved thus far, with a couple of goals in mind:

Increase our weekly publishing cadence to bring readers more insightful AI in marketing content.
Re-center ourselves around our core content pillars to continue delivering on our original vision for the ai marketer.

If you’ve been a reader since last year, thank you! If you’ve only just joined in, welcome (and be sure to subscribe to the ai marketer weekly newsletter here)! Here’s to another year of innovation and industry insight.

the ai marketer Turns 1: A Look at Lessons Learned, Our Best Posts & the Industry at Large