Medium’s State of Writing Report 2026: A private writing revival
Most writers are using AI in some way, but also most of their writing is happening in private.
The role writing plays in our lives is changing dramatically at this moment. The advent of AI tools has fundamentally shifted how we all understand the act of writing, and how we interpret the writing we consume.
A lot of pundits say reading and writing are dead.
As a reading and writing company, that perspective is unacceptable to us. It also flies in the face of what we’re seeing on our own platform. For instance: The number of active, non-spam writers publishing on Medium is up 35% year-to-date from 2025.
So we set out to understand what’s really going on with writing, right now. We started by asking writers what they think of writing, partnering with the team at the Harris Poll to ask 1,175 writers across the internet about their writing, how they write, how often they write, why they write. Drawing from that survey and our internal data and industry sources, the 2026 State of Writing Reports aims to dispel myths and hype around what’s changing, and share data from actual writers about where things really stand with writing.
The strongest theme is that writers still love writing, and they’re optimistic about the future. Most writers say they like or love the process of writing, and they’re more likely to say that their skills are improving and that they feel positive about writing overall. And while most have recently used AI for writing, they remain skeptical of AI-assisted writing whether they produced it themselves or are encountering it as readers, reinforcing that AI may be gaining ground as a tool, but isn’t at risk of replacing the author.
Let’s dig in.
(Click here to download a PDF version of the Medium State of Writing Report 2026)
Most writers use AI…
Most writers (71%) have used AI in some way as a part of their writing practice in the last three months — in fact, it’s the only writing tool we asked about that saw increased reported use over the past 12 months, (24% now using AI writing assistants vs. 19% saying they used it 12 months ago), a bigger relative increase in use than tools like word processing platforms, newsletter tools, and note-taking apps. And of those who use AI in their writing, nearly all (88%) say that AI has had an impact on their writing process in myriad ways, both positive and negative, from improving drafts (41%) to increasing pressure to produce more (19%).
AI usage fell into a variety of familiar buckets: editing for grammar, clarity, or tone (33%), followed by getting topic ideas (26%), getting feedback or critiques (20%), and generating first drafts (19%). When asked what the perceived benefits of AI are, writers who use it report improved draft quality (41%), making writers more likely to experiment (30%), reducing time to produce work (28%), and improving confidence about publishing (27%).
…but they don’t trust it
Yet on the whole, writers don’t trust writing produced using AI, whether they produced it themselves (60% distrust) or someone else did (69% distrust).
1 in 3 writers believe most of what they read is written by AI
Three-quarters of writers suspect at least some of what they read was written by AI, and a third believe most or a lot of it is. That’s a remarkable level of ambient suspicion baked into everyday reading — it means writers are now reading everything through an “is this even human” filter, which is a meaningful shift in how content gets consumed and trusted.
Nearly 1 in 4 writers say AI has changed their voice
AI is having an impact at the creative level for writers: 24% say AI has changed their style or voice, 19% say it has increased pressure to produce more, and 14% say it has reduced confidence in their own ideas or voice.
These concerns sit alongside other AI concerns reflected in other surveys out there. In their September 2025 survey of writing professionals, Gotham Ghostwriters and Josh Bernoff found that 91% of professional writers were worried about hallucinations, and 78% worry that AI is making writing bland and boring.
As search traffic recedes, AI isn’t filling the gap
From Medium’s own data, we’ve seen a 35% decline in our traffic from search over the last year, in line with what we’ve seen broadly across the industry. Meanwhile, referral traffic to Medium writers’ stories is growing but still extremely modest, and an early surge of growth from OpenAI’s ChatGPT has since disappeared. Referrals from these three sources in August was still less than half of one percent of Google search traffic.
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Worth noting: This internal data only shows referrals from Google Gemini, not data from Google’s other AI tools like AI overviews or AI search, since we can’t (yet) track those separately.
Writing is overwhelmingly a private act — only 1 in 4 people share publicly
Among writers we surveyed, writing remains far more personal than public: Only a quarter of the general public share written content publicly at least monthly with only 18% of all writers saying they are publishing more often than 12 months ago (see footnote 1). This isn’t to say that writers aren’t sharing their work; one third of respondents said they write to share with their friends.
Meanwhile, a little over half of the general public (54%) write for themselves — meaning the default mode of writing today is still solitary, not performative (see footnote 1). Even more telling, going public doesn’t mean giving up the private practice: of that 25% who do share publicly, three-quarters (76%) also write for themselves. In other words, even writers who focus on sharing publicly are still writing for their own eyes only, which we see reflected in our own data (Medium data shows that writers wrote 4.4 million unpublished drafts in the last year alone, and we’ve got our new writing app TK, which allows for private and small group writing).
Earning money isn’t the focus — even for writers who publish in public
Only 12% write to earn money, dwarfed by self-expression (56%) and self-care (41%). More surprising: Even among the subset of writers (43%) who publish publicly and are more visibility-driven, only 29% are actually paid for their writing. Writers who share their writing publicly are primarily looking for readers and reach, not revenue.
And some write for the follow-on impact that writing has in their career: 16% write to build influence or reach an audience, 12% write for career advancement or professional visibility.
Despite all the AI disruption, writers feel more optimistic than anxious about the craft
If everyone’s telling us that reading and writing are dead due to AI, these findings surprised us the most–because it isn’t what writers are feeling. Half of writers say their own skills have improved in the past year (only 8% say worse), and writers are far more likely to feel positive about writing in general than negative (42% vs. 8%). AI is clearly injecting anxiety at the margins — 19% feel more pressure to produce, 14% feel less confident in their own voice — but the overall mood is optimistic.
Writers ♥️ reading…
At Medium, we know that one of the fundamental paths to writing well is reading well, and the writers we surveyed agreed: 45% said that they read to improve their writing skills. 57% of writers surveyed say they are spending the same time reading as they did a year ago, while 32% say they actually spend more time reading. Only 11% of the writers surveyed reported they were reading less.
…and writers still ♥️ writing
Despite the doomsayers proclaiming that writing is dead, 75% of our respondents said that they like or love writing — though we must admit we’re very curious about the 5% who said they dislike or hate it.
This enthusiasm for the craft followed throughout the responses, indicating that writers use writing as a way to think, to connect with one another, to understand the world around them. They use it to sharpen their professional skills, reach new people, and build their own confidence: in the Harris Poll, 42% write to clarify their thinking or process ideas, and 41% write for self-care or mental health.
When asked what their top goals were for the next 12 months, 38% of writers want to complete a major personal work. Meanwhile, only 22% want to grow their audiences substantially, and only 19% want to earn a meaningful income from writing.
On our end, we know that writers still love writing — whether they’re reaching millions of readers or keeping a private daily writing practice. This is the quiet revival: while the world changes fast, the love and value of writing isn’t going anywhere.
Methodology
The Harris Poll survey was conducted online within the United States by The Harris Poll on behalf of Medium from August 12–17, 2026, among 1,175 writers among who 1,099 write for themselves and 504 have published or publicly shared their writing at least once a month. Data are weighted where necessary by age by gender, region, race/ethnicity, household income, education, marital status, size of household, and political party to bring them in line with their actual proportions in the population.
Respondents for this survey were selected from among those who have agreed to participate in our surveys. The sampling precision of Harris online polls is measured by using a Bayesian credible interval. For this study, the full sample data is accurate to within + 4.0 percentage points using a 95% confidence level. This credible interval will be wider among subsets of the surveyed population of interest.
All sample surveys and polls, whether or not they use probability sampling, are subject to other multiple sources of error which are most often not possible to quantify or estimate, including, but not limited to coverage error, error associated with nonresponse, error associated with question wording and response options, and post-survey weighting and adjustments.
Footnote 1: As measured from an online study conducted by The Harris Poll from August 6–8, 2026 among a representative sample of 2,008 U.S. adults ages 18 or older.
