Adapting to AI web search changes

Google search has already changed significantly with the prominence of AI summaries at the top of search pages. Small businesses are already seeing a drop in traffic. Major news companies like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are seeing a sharp and fast decline in their web traffic because they get 25-40% of their traffic from Google searches and that’s dropped in a matter of months.

Since Google searches are one of the main ways that audiences discover arts events and things to do, this shift is important for arts organizations to pay attention to. David Taylor, a digital arts marketer specializing in classical music, wrote about this change and the importance of arts organizations to pay attention to it in his blog here.

I know, I know: you already put a lot of time into learning about SEO (search engine optimization) and getting and using Google Ads grants, and keeping up with the shifts and changes over the years. Sorry, it’s just going to keep changing.

So I would recommend that arts organizations learn all they can about how to make sure that they’re showing up in the new format that incorporates AI. Seek out reputable sources for how to adjust. Here’s some guidance directly from Google, which is always a good place to start. Marketing companies are already putting out content on this topic, too. I found several blog posts and YouTube videos about it from just a quick Google search. Don’t worry that their advice is not specifically about arts. (In fact, that can be a good thing because arts marketing is usually quite a bit behind current practice.) I don’t have enough information about whether or not these are good companies, so I don’t want to link them here. But the few videos I watched seemed to make sense to me: adapt your SEO strategy with even more amped up brand positioning so that you leverage the predictive language model’s associative properties. Do not assume that people will put any effort into scrolling down the page or finding your organization specifically. You want to be in that AI overview.

I was dismayed in 2023 when Capacity Interactive, a leading digital marketing firm for the arts, all but discouraged arts organizations from putting attention to search within social media. I thought they were too cautious in recommending that arts organizations not make search within social media apps a priority because the use of Google search by current audiences was still strong. Meanwhile, I was watching my students (undergraduates, mostly between the ages of 18 and 24) go straight to Instagram or TikTok when searching. Plus, search within social media was what marketing professionals were focused on in the private sector. At the time, I thought that if arts organizations didn’t also work in improving their visibility on social media, it would just further continue the neglect of developing younger audiences. And here we are in 2025, and I think the lack of attention to having strong content creation strategies is a big part of the continued stagnation and decline of arts audiences now.

Don’t miss the boat. Adapt to AI search as quickly as you can.