Do people still read blogs? Based on the surveys available, yes: in a HubSpot poll of 325 people (the article was updated in May 2025), 17% said they never read blogs, which means about 83% of the people in that poll read them at least sometimes. That number describes the people HubSpot asked, so it isn't a national readership rate for 2026, and the evidence grade for this whole question is mixed. The direction is clear enough to answer a stakeholder who thinks nobody reads blogs anymore, and the limits are worth knowing before you repeat any of it.
If you're a founder and someone on your board or team has asked whether blogging is still relevant to a company like yours, this piece gives you the numbers that exist, who measured them, and what each one can and can't support. It stays on one question, whether people read blogs and why they do. Numbers on how many companies blog, how long posts run, or what a blog earns sit in separate pieces.
Do people still read blogs in 2026?
The most direct evidence comes from HubSpot's poll of 325 people. Alongside the 17% who never read blogs, 29% said they read them one to four times a month and 18% said they read them daily. Those categories don't add up to everyone, because the poll had other frequency options in between, so it's best to quote each figure on its own.
HubSpot doesn't say when it ran the poll. The article was updated on May 13, 2025, but that date tells you when the page was edited, not when people answered the questions. It also doesn't claim the sample is nationally representative. So the honest reading is that blog reading is still common among the people HubSpot reached, and that nobody in the sources reviewed has published a current, representative 2026 percentage for all adults.
The same poll asked whether people were reading more or less than the year before. 57% said about the same, 35% said more, and 9% said less (the total runs over 100% because of rounding). This is a good place to be careful. It's what respondents remember about their own habits inside one poll, and it can't be treated as one of the blog readership trends you'd get from measuring the same audience across several years. Because the survey year isn't stated, it also can't be described as a change from 2025 to 2026.
How often do people read, and do they read the whole post?
Reading a blog and reading every word of it are different things, and the data reflects that. In the same 325-person HubSpot poll, 35% said they mostly skim blogs and 38% said they mix skimming with deeper reading. Another 13% said they deep-read more than they skim, and 6% go straight to the piece of information they need and leave without reading the rest.
Those four groups don't cover every possible answer, so they aren't a complete picture of the audience. What they do show is that skimming is a normal way to read a blog. A skim can still get someone the answer they came for, which is worth keeping in mind if a stakeholder points at short time on page as proof nobody reads.
A second finding from the separate 298-person HubSpot survey points the same way. 33.2% of respondents said a blog fails them when it takes too long to deliver what its title or description promised. That's a reported frustration, not a measured drop-off rate, but it fits with the skimming numbers. Readers seem willing to show up and quick to leave if the answer isn't where the headline said it would be.
Why do people read blogs?
Two different HubSpot studies address motivation, and they ask different questions, so it helps to keep them apart.
The first is the 325-person poll. 61% of respondents said that what drew them to the last three blogs they read was wanting to learn, educate themselves, or answer questions unrelated to their career or schooling. That question is about recent reading, so it doesn't estimate every reason anyone has ever opened a blog.
The second is a HubSpot survey of 298 people across the United States (the article was updated on August 26, 2025 and first published in May 2020, and the fieldwork date isn't given). Respondents could pick more than one reason, so these percentages overlap and shouldn't be added together:
| Reason for reading blogs | Share selecting it |
|---|---|
| Learning something unrelated to their career | 62.2% |
| Entertainment | 51.1% |
| Learning about news or trends in their job industry | 42% |
| Fulfilling a reading obligation | 10% |
The same survey reports that 29% read to learn something related to their industry. That's a separate response from the 42% who chose industry news or trends, so the two shouldn't be merged into one professional-learning number.
Taken together, the two studies agree on the main point. Learning and answering a question sit near the top in both, even though they were asked different ways of different people. Entertainment sits close behind. That matters for a company blog, because a reader can spend time on a post without ever thinking about the company that published it.
The survey also asked what makes people read. 32% named video, imagery, or other multimedia, and 27.9% named advice or insights from experts or thought leaders. Those are stated attractions, not tested tactics, so they're a reasonable prompt to answer the question fast and with real expertise, and not a promise that adding an image or a quote will lift readership by any set amount.
Does that interest carry over to a SaaS buyer?
The consumer polls above don't tell you much about the person who evaluates software, so it helps to look at research on B2B buyers. Redpoint Insights surveyed 250 U.S. B2B buyers in July 2025, all of them people who had researched or recommended vendors in the previous 12 months. 33% said how-to or educational content played a significant role in a recent purchase decision, and 22% said the same about thought-leadership articles.
Those are content categories, and they aren't blog-reading rates. A how-to guide or a thought-leadership article can be published as a blog post, but the survey didn't ask about blogs. So you can say that a meaningful share of surveyed B2B buyers credited educational and thought-leadership content in a recent purchase. You can't say that 33% of buyers read how-to blogs, or that 22% read blogs before buying.
It also doesn't show that a specific company's blog caused a sale. The survey covers people involved in vendor research, so it's closer to your situation than a consumer poll is, but it's still one study with 250 people.
What has AI changed about reading blogs?
Some of the doubt about blogging comes from AI answers. The evidence here is about a different question, which is whether readers click through to the original page.
Reading a blog, meeting its information inside an AI answer, and visiting the original page are three separate outcomes, and the surveys measure them differently:
- Redpoint found that 58% of its surveyed B2B buyers were using or experimenting with AI tools in their evaluation process, with some describing uses like summarizing vendor content. That doesn't say how many of them still visit the original posts.
- Pew Research Center's 2025 analysis looked at actual browsing by 900 U.S. adults in March 2025. It found that Google users were less likely to click on links when an AI summary appeared. That is observed behavior, but it covers search results in general and doesn't isolate blogs.
- A separate Pew survey, conducted February 17 to 23, 2026 among 5,119 U.S. adults, found that 60% had ever read AI summaries at the top of search results. That measures exposure to the summaries, and people were reporting on themselves.
None of these tells you the total audience for blogs, and none of them proves that AI alone explains a change in one site's traffic. HubSpot's respondents also said they found blog posts through social posts or promotions (30%) and through search results (18%), so search was never the only route. Those are self-reported discovery routes and not analytics data, but they're a useful answer if someone assumes a drop in search referrals means readers are gone.
How to read these numbers
The five sources here can't be turned into one readership rate, and it helps to say why when you share them.
| Source | Who was asked | When | What it can support |
|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot poll | 325 people | Article updated May 2025, fieldwork date not given | Reading frequency, skimming, recent reasons, discovery routes |
| HubSpot survey | 298 people in the United States | Article updated August 2025, fieldwork date not given | Stated reasons for reading, what attracts and frustrates readers |
| Redpoint Insights | 250 U.S. B2B buyers | July 2025 | How much buyers credit educational and thought-leadership content |
| Pew browsing study | 900 U.S. adults | March 2025 | Click behavior when an AI summary appears |
| Pew adult survey | 5,119 U.S. adults | February 2026 | How many have ever seen AI summaries in search |
Each row has a different group of people, a different date, and a different question. HubSpot is also a company that publishes marketing content, which is worth remembering when you weigh its polls, and both of its surveys are described in its own articles. The terms are not interchangeable either: blog posts, thought-leadership articles, educational content, and AI summaries are different things, and a percentage for one shouldn't be rewritten as a percentage for another.
Is blogging still relevant as an investment?
The evidence is enough to answer the claim that nobody reads blogs anymore. People do read them, many of them skim, and they mostly come to learn something or get a question answered. B2B buyers also say educational content plays a role in some of their purchases.
The evidence isn't enough to say that publishing more posts will bring more readers, leads, or a lower customer acquisition cost, and no source reviewed for this piece claims that. Whether your own blog pays off has to be judged with your own audience and outcome data. A reasonable next step is to write down the questions your customers actually ask, answer each one plainly near the top of a post, and check over a few months which of those pages people reach and where they go next. If you want a way to see whether your pages show up as sources in AI answers as well, DeepSmith tracks that, and you can start a free trial whenever you'd like to look.
It would change the picture if someone published a current, representative survey that measured blog reading the same way over several years, and if credible site-level evidence linked what readers need to business results. Until then, the careful answer to whether blogging still works is that the audience hasn't gone away, and the return is something you check for your own site.
