The 7 Top Content Marketing Trends for 2025 (+How to Prepare for Each)

If 2024 was the year content marketing blew up, 2025 will be the year we start to see through the settling dust.

We’ll have new data to determine how much to invest in traditional SEO, get a feel for what our new tech stack looks like, and figure out where AI-powered answer engines fit in our strategy. We’ll also start to gain clarity on AI transparency and the importance of online forums in content marketing 3.0.

2025 will be a year of transition in content marketing. Follow the seven trends we’ve outlined here to stay ahead of the most important changes and set yourself up for years of success.

Contents

• Marketers will build uniqueness moats around content
• AI technology stacks will expand exponentially
• AEO becomes the next content marketing focus
• We’ll see the dawn of AI transparency
• Forums take center stage in 2025
• The call for distribution diversity increases
• In 2025, AI education will become mission-critical

2025 content marketing trends

Let’s look at some of the top content marketing trends for 2025 and some ways you can get ready to take advantage of them.

1. Marketers will build uniqueness moats around content

There’s a little renaissance happening in the content marketing corners of LinkedIn. Expert SEOs and content creators are talking a little less about creating lots of content quickly and a little more about making each piece more competitive.

It’s not the old content marketing trend trope of “content needs to be authentic” driving the conversations. It’s a call to once again prioritize adding something novel—a unique perspective or new data—to make your content rise above the sea of sameness.

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The chorus got louder towards the end of 2024, with several notable pros joining in:

• Tim Soulo, Ahrefs CMO, shared how great content is built around news, experiments, data, stories, and discoveries.
• Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro, pointed to a site that does incredibly in-depth experiments on cooking knives as the epitome of value-driven content.
• Jay Acunzo, speaker and storytelling adviser, suggested that documenting your little life moments is “the biggest, best, and easiest way to create more valuable, original work.”
• Will Reynolds, VP of innovation at Seer Interactive, talked about leveling up “Google-only content” to “Humans loved it” content using things like subject-matter expert interviews.

To a large degree, this content marketing trend is a reaction to the high-throughput AI content experiments of early 2024. It quickly became apparent that a content quantity arms race was a losing proposition since everyone could access the same tools to pump out posts.

What’s left is competing on quality and, more specifically, uniqueness. We’ll see more marketers creatively sourcing new data from unexpected places and then using it to build uniqueness moats around their content that AI can’t compete with.

Content marketers will source unique insights from creative places in 2025.

Almost paradoxically, AI will make competing against AI possible. As we’ll discuss in the next trend, content marketers will have a whole arsenal of AI tools to extract ideas, parse data, and repurpose original content.

Pushing out more content faster won’t be the play in 2025. The brands that build unfordable uniqueness moats will be the winners of attention and trust in the coming year.

How to prepare for this trend:

• Look for unique insights everywhere (your internal user data, surveys, interviews with subject matter experts, product experiments, etc.).
• Ask, “What are we adding to the conversation?” for every piece of content in your calendar.
• Use AI tools to surface new ideas from videos, long text documents, and interview transcripts.

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2. AI technology stacks will expand exponentially

Already, 88% of marketers say they use AI in their work, and 70% say they’ll use it more in the year ahead. But we won’t just be logging onto the same one or two platforms. In 2025, expect to see marketers’ toolboxes fill up with a wide range of AI tools, each tasked with tackling a different marketing challenge.

Until recently, most of us plunked our prompts into ChatGPT and cajoled it to solve all of our problems. Now, we can ask one tool to robo-voice a podcast from a webinar transcript while a different platform creates an infographic from a blog post.

A new crop of AI tools focuses on one specific marketing challenge, like managing an influencer seeding program.

This new breed of point-solution software numbers in the hundreds, with new options popping up constantly. Here are a few interesting options to start with:

• Influencity uses AI to help you find and manage the perfect influencer.
• Design.ai is an image generator you can use to create logos, videos, and even face swaps.
• Infography will read your blog post and spin up an infographic from it.
• ElevenLabs is a voice generator that adds voiceovers to ads, social media posts, and more.
• Eddie AI transforms your raw interview videos into sleek and polished visual stories.

Many legacy content marketing tools like Canva and Grammarly are also bolting on AI functionality. So, even if you don’t explicitly choose an AI solution, you may end up using AI in your existing workflows.

How to prepare for this trend:

• Start by identifying repetitive and time-consuming tasks, plus any new marketing avenue (like podcasts) you’d love to delve into but don’t have the time, and search for AI solutions to help.
• Regularly read roundups of new AI tools.
• Search the platforms you already use to see what AI functionality they’ve added.
• Follow marketing AI and efficiency gurus like Anna Burgess Yang and Celia Quillian.

3. AEO becomes the next content marketing focus

Answer engines are increasingly replacing traditional search engines as the tool of choice to find information online. As they proliferate in 2025, we’ll see answer engine optimization (AEO) added to many content marketers’ to-do lists.

Answer engines gained much traction as a replacement, or enhancement, of traditional search in 2024. Google expanded its AI Overviews, which now appear in nearly half of all searches. Platforms like Perplexity are becoming more popular (it has over 15 million users). And AI behemoth OpenAI launched its new web search platform, ChatGPT search.

Answer engines like Perplexity are becoming popular alternatives for people searching the internet.

In their early iterations, AI-powered results offered minimal citations to the content their answers were based on. That posed a huge problem for content marketers who need traffic from those results to justify creating new content. Answer engines responded, and now many highlight sources more prominently, as SEO expert Lily Ray recently pointed out.

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The expanded citations, like those in both Google AI Overviews and Perplexity answers, mean more chances to build brand awareness and traffic from answer engines. Content marketers are beginning to see the potential.

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The migration to answer engines will likely accelerate in 2025. We’ll also see more experiments and data from marketers to teach us how to rank our content in AI answers. It’ll be essential to stay tuned to this new channel moving forward.

How to prepare for this trend:

• Include a concise answer to the main question in your content, similar to how you’d optimize for featured snippets.
• Use natural, conversational language in your content.
• Tighten up your structure (FAQs and schema markup especially).
• If you have a physical location, get your business listings in order since that’s where AI pulls local search replies.
• Add trust signals like citing verified authors in your content.

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4. We’ll see the dawn of AI transparency

Last year, we mentioned that you wouldn’t be required to label content created with AI as such. This year, consumer preference, federal and state laws, and voluntary action by big tech platforms will start to change that.

For the most part, people don’t care if you use AI to create content. But they really want you to tell them when you do. In two separate surveys, 71% and 69% of respondents said the use of AI should be disclosed. And a poll by the AI Policy Institute showed that 80% of Americans think passing off AI content as human-created should be illegal.

AI images are a hot button, with 87% of consumers saying it’s important to use authentic images.

Officials at both the state and federal levels are addressing these concerns. New Hampshire passed AI regulations and criminalized deepfakes. Utah added AI-centric consumer protections to its legal code. And the White House issued an Executive Order which, in part, addressed the labeling of “synthetic content produced by AI systems.”

Meta and TikTok joined the AI transparency movement by announcing that they’d voluntarily add AI content labeling systems to their platforms.

Most of these actions don’t implicitly force brands to call out which blogs or ebooks are AI-generated. Nor do they set any type of standard for what “AI-generated” means (what if you use Claude to generate a brief, an outline, or conduct research?).

However, it does show mounting pressure from multiple sources to be more transparent about your AI activities. It’s likely that pressure, and the sources that apply it, will increase in 2025. And brands that plan for it won’t be scrambling as it does.

How to prepare for this trend:

• Speak to your customers to get a feel for their AI tolerance.
• Create an internal AI rulebook.
• Ask freelancers and external contributors how they use AI.
• Make a brand standard for what constitutes an “AI-generated” asset.
• Consider adding watermarks, disclaimers, and an AI-use statement on your website.

5. Forums take center stage in 2025

Online forums have long been the semi-secret weapon of the best content marketers. Google, along with an increased search for authenticity online, gave these digital gathering spaces a gigantic boost in 2024. This year, we’ll see more marketers jumping into forums to find a pipeline of new customers they couldn’t access before.

The biggest impetus for this trend was Google’s August core update. The search engine’s algorithms placed forum content, especially Reddit, in top SERP spots. Reddit was catapulted to the third most visible website in results pages, quadrupling the traffic it got from Google.

Meanwhile, Google users started seeking out forum content to find answers from real people.

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The forum trust extends to businesses. 90% of users say they trust Reddit to learn about products and brands. And 27% of Redditors are more likely to buy a product they see advertised on Reddit versus other platforms.

That level of loyalty and attention will attract more activity from marketers. Expect to see experts share how they’re gaining traction on Reddit.

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Marketing on forums isn’t like promotions on other platforms. You will immediately get downvoted to oblivion if you go in all salesy. So, the question is, will marketers find a new funnel of leads from forums in 2025, or is it a siren song that ultimately leads to lost time and assets?

How to prepare for this trend:

• Figure out which segments of your audience spend time on forums and which discussion boards they frequent.
• Spend time in each forum learning the rules, seeing how users connect, and watching how other brands interact.
• Consider paid ads to speed up your results.
• Set appropriate goals since getting results from forums may take longer than, say, Google Ads.

6. The call for distribution diversity increases

Google’s turbulent year shellshocked many content marketers who relied on SEO for site visits. Alphabet’s search engine behemoth is still one of the best sources of organic traffic, though. In 2025, brands will need to balance finding novel distribution methods for their content with feeding the Google algorithm.

Two 2024 core updates throttled traffic to many websites. Some sites lost over 90% of their organic search visitors almost overnight. Then AI Overviews popped up, pushing our links down the SERP and further threatening our traffic. Most recently, a potential court-ordered Google breakup shook an already wobbly search industry.

Headlines like these were common in the months following Google’s March and August core updates.

For many, it felt like the final nail in SEO’s coffin. But as the dust cleared and more data rolled in, it became clear that Google is still the channel for organic traffic.

Consider a couple of data reviews from Rand Fishkin at SparkToro. One noted how efficient Google is at distributing traffic to other websites. The search engine is responsible for sending 60% of all referral traffic while only receiving 9% of the incoming clicks.

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Another Sparktoro study showed that 51% of searches have an informational intent while nearly 56% are generic (non-branded). That leaves a lot of traffic out there for brands willing to educate their audience through SEO content.

Herein lies the 2025 reality for content marketers. You need to buffer traffic acquisition against Google’s volatility, but you don’t want to ignore the largest source of organic traffic available.

That’s why, in 2025, we’ll see brands get crazy creative with how they produce and distribute content. Content repurposing, which was a trend in 2024, will become even more important. This year, internal brand ambassadors, external content distribution networks, and AI-enabled content repurposing will be standard practice for more brands.

How to prepare for this trend: 

• Create content with a “distribution-first” mindset so every piece can have as many lives as possible.
• Consider adding AI tools that help you pull insights from interviews, webinars, and long-form blog posts to turn into social media captions and other short-form content.
• Start building a network of both internal and external influencers who can offer quotes for content (which Google loves) and then share it with their followers.
• Review your existing library of SEO content to see if any of it can be updated quickly and used in other channels.

7. In 2025, AI education becomes mission-critical

There’s a huge chasm between the rate at which brands are adopting AI tools and the comfort level the average marketer has using them. In 2025, we’ll see content team leaders create more organized AI education while freelancers and individual contributors find ways to learn on their own.

Last year, we mentioned that 2024 would be a year of intentional AI adoption for content marketing teams. While that was true (In January of 2024, 56% of marketers said their companies were implementing AI, primarily for content marketing), education didn’t keep up. 70% of marketers said their employers don’t provide generative AI training—even though over half said it’s important for their role. 43% said they don’t know how to get the most value out of generative AI.

With so many new tools and use cases developing, the learning curve will only get steeper for content marketers.

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That’s why 2025 is a critical year for content marketers to get up to speed. Expect a lot more “learning in public” AI experiments, internal AI training regiments, and freelancers trading tips on using AI in their workflows.

Expect a lot of playful experimentation as marketing leaders push the limits of their AI tools in 2025.

How to prepare for this trend:

• Create a formal AI education program and use guidelines for internal employees.
• Encourage experiments and share learning externally (that’s great engagement content).
• Consider signing up for free trials of new AI tools and allocating time for your team to use and review them.
• Individual contributors and freelancers should set aside recurring time blocks for AI learning.

Stay current on content marketing trends

Content marketing is a different game now, and 2025 is the year we learn what it will look like for the next decade. There’s no resting on what worked in 2015. You’ll need to get intentional about education and tracking trends to stay on top. Marketers who carve out time for learning, experimenting, and following other experts will be in a position to pivot, no matter what 2025 throws our way.

Ready for more 2025 marketing trends and tips? Check out these resources:

• 10 key insights to inform your marketing plans in 2025
• How to Thrive in 2025: 10 Marketing Pros Give Their Top Tips
• The Big Small Business Marketing Trends Report for 2025