Roughly 80% of Marketing, Engineering, and IT Leaders Say Manual Validation Is Blocking AI at Scale

Pantheon's State of the Web 2026 report finds AI sped up content and code creation, but the systems built to review, govern, and ship that work haven't kept pace.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Pantheon.io, the platform for helping professional teams create, run, and evolve the sites that matter, today released findings from its State of the Web 2026 report, a survey of 1,000 marketing, engineering, and IT/security leaders across the U.S., UK, and DACH. The research reveals AI has accelerated content, code, and policy creation across the web lifecycle, while the systems behind it (validation, measurement, and governance) have struggled to keep up.

That strain is sharpest around validation. Marketing (79%), engineering (78%), and IT/security (83%) leaders cite manual validation (i.e., time spent auditing, fact-checking, and correcting AI outputs) as the top barrier to scaling AI, landing within five percentage points of each other despite different tools, budgets, and incentives.

Instead of shared frustration when it comes to measurement, there’s a disagreement about what's actually happening. Marketing's confidence in its traffic being real isn't shared by IT as AI bots rise. A majority (84%) of marketing leaders are confident their traffic metrics reflect real human visitors, but 80% of IT leaders say AI crawler and bot traffic has already impacted their infrastructure over the past year.

Faster Isn't the Same as Easier
For marketing leaders, internal review and approval (31%) has surpassed content creation (21%) as the single biggest blocker to getting new content live. Engineering leaders report a parallel reality: 68% say they spend at least half their time maintaining existing code and infrastructure rather than building something new.

Only 44% of marketing leaders and 55% of engineering leaders say AI has made them genuinely faster overall, while the rest report time redirected elsewhere or no change at all. The dynamic is also reshaping team relationships, with more than half (51%) of marketing leaders saying AI and vibe coding tools have made them less reliant on developers, but only 36% of engineers report actually receiving fewer requests. Instead, 68% of engineering leaders say they're now reviewing and fixing AI-generated code from other teams.

“AI didn’t remove the bottleneck in the web lifecycle, it moved it downstream,” said Richard Jones, Chief Commercial Officer at Pantheon. “Every team we surveyed is hitting the same wall from a different direction. Marketing is drowning in review queues, engineering is buried in maintenance, and IT is stuck validating work it didn’t sign off on in the first place. The organizations that win in the AI era won’t be the ones that adopted AI fastest. They’ll be the ones that build the operational foundation to run it safely at scale.”

Additional findings from the survey include:

• The Hidden Line Item: 77–79% of engineering and IT leaders, and 68% of marketing leaders, cite unexpected infrastructure, API, and token costs as a challenge when scaling AI operations for the web.
• The Codebase Ceiling: 22% of engineering leaders call their hosting platform or CMS a primary bottleneck with a hard ceiling on ship speed, and 78% cite integration complexity with legacy systems as a challenge when scaling AI operations.
• Security Policy Outpaced Practice: 93% of IT leaders updated their security policy specifically for AI integrations in the past 12 months, yet 81% still call compliance lag a persistent operational obstacle.
• The AI Crawler Bill: 42% of IT leaders have confirmed unexpected infrastructure costs or billing disputes tied directly to AI crawler traffic, with another 41% suspecting exposure they haven’t yet been able to confirm.
• A New Machine Audience: 85% of marketing leaders now track whether their content appears in AI search results, and 85% have made changes to their site to serve AI systems directly, but only about half of each group has a formal, deliberate process behind it.

Across every function, the pattern is the same: AI increased the volume of work without increasing the capacity to keep pace with it. This isn't a case for slowing AI down. It's a case for giving teams a way to move at AI speed without losing control. Pantheon helps developers, marketers, and agencies create and ship faster inside reusable systems, reviewable AI-assisted workflows, and clear guardrails, so speed and safety don't have to trade off against each other.

To explore the full State of the Web 2026 findings, including detailed regional breakdowns across the U.S., UK, and DACH, click here.

Survey Methodology
The online survey of 1,000 marketing, engineering, and IT/security leaders was commissioned by Pantheon and fielded by global market research firm Dynata in June 2026, across the United States, United Kingdom, and DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) regions.

About Pantheon
Pantheon.io helps professionals create, run, and evolve the websites that matter across teams and frameworks. One governed platform for WordPress, Drupal, and Next.js, Pantheon lets organizations move at AI-era speed while staying in control. Learn more at pantheon.io.