Someone typed "what's on at [local venue] this weekend?" into an AI assistant last month. It came back with nothing. The venue's website was live, the listings were current, the show was on sale. The AI just couldn't see it.
This is happening right now, at scale, across the cultural sector.
Our AI audit
Between June and August 2026, CultureSuite ran website audits on 339 cultural organisations across the Nordics, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark, spanning theatres, music venues, classical venues and multi-purpose venues.
Each site was checked against Google's Lighthouse standards for performance, accessibility and SEO. On top of that, we checked two more specific things. First, whether the site allows AI crawlers to read it at all. Second, whether its event pages carry Event schema, the structured data that tells an AI assistant what's on, when it's on, where, and how to book.
The results: 81% of the venues audited were effectively invisible to AI. Most hadn't blocked anything on purpose. Their websites let AI crawlers in without any trouble. But with no Event schema on the page, there was nothing for a crawler to actually understand once it arrived. An AI assistant could load the homepage just fine. It just had no way of knowing that a show existed, or when it started, or where to buy a ticket.
81% of venues audited were effectively invisible to AI
Only 17% had both open access and confirmed Event schema. A further 5% were actively blocking AI crawlers outright, removing themselves from the conversation entirely.
The biggest opportunity: theatres
Theatres were the largest group in the audit (129 venues), and the segment with the most room to gain ground on Event schema. Only 8.5% had it in place, which means the vast majority have a quick, meaningful win sitting untouched.
Theatres run previews, transfers, understudies, matinees, and last-minute cast changes, a programme that shifts constantly. Every theatre puts real effort into announcing a season: press releases, print brochures, social campaigns. Almost none have told the machines about it yet.
It isn't that theatres are behind on digital. Most of these sites perform perfectly well for a human visitor. This is simply a newer gap, and one that's easy to close.
Why this isn't really a website problem
It's tempting to read this as "these websites need work." That's not quite it.
Most of these sites were built to do exactly what was asked of them at the time: look good, list the programme, sell tickets, work on mobile. AI-readability simply wasn't part of the brief when these websites were originally built. Times changed. Technology evolved. And the job of websites shifted.
That's the pattern behind almost every one of these numbers. A website built as a one-off project reflects the world at the moment it launched. A discovery channel that didn't exist two years ago won't be accounted for in a site built five years ago.
"A website built as a one-off project reflects the world at the moment it launched."
What to actually do about it
None of this requires a rebuild. It requires someone to check three things, and each one is genuinely quick to do yourself.
- Check whether your site is blocking AI crawlers. Your robots.txt file sits at yourwebsite.com/robots.txt and is worth a look. Google's introduction to robots.txt explains what to look for; if you spot GPTBot, Google-Extended or similar being blocked, that's an easy fix for whoever manages your site.
- Check whether your event pages carry Event schema. This is backend markup, not design, so a page can look perfect and still have none of it. Schema.org's Event reference and Google's guide to Event structured data both explain what should be there and why.
- Test a live page. Google's Rich Results Test will show you, page by page, exactly what an AI or search engine can and can't read from your event listings.
Most venues stop at robots.txt and assume the job's done. It isn't. robots.txt only controls whether an AI crawler is allowed onto your site at all, it says nothing about whether the crawler can actually make sense of what it finds once it's there. That's a separate, newer file called llms.txt, a still-evolving standard (see llmstxt.org) for surfacing useful information about your site directly to AI systems, effectively handing them a clean summary rather than making them guess. Almost nobody in the sector has one yet, which is exactly why it's worth the few minutes it takes.
If you're already part of our Community, most of the technical side of this is already handled. Structured data is generated automatically from your event and production data, so there's no manual JSON-LD to write or keep updated, and it stays in sync as your programme changes. Sitemaps work the same way (Berkeley Rep's is a good live example). llms.txt is newer ground for everyone; our support team can currently set one up for your site in a few minutes, and as the standard settles, we're working towards making that fully self-serve too.
If any of this comes back showing gaps and you're not on CultureSuite, it's worth raising with whoever manages your CMS. Ask them directly whether Event schema is implemented on your production pages, not just theoretically supported.
For a venue with a constantly shifting programme, checking this once isn't enough; it needs to hold up every time a new show goes live, which is really a question about whether your website updates itself or waits for someone to remember.
The bigger shift
AI-driven discovery is still early, but it isn't a novelty. More people are starting a search for "what's on" inside an AI assistant rather than a search engine, and that number only moves in one direction. The venues showing up in those answers in two years' time will be the ones that treated this as ordinary maintenance now, not the ones that scrambled once it became unavoidable.
Your programme evolves every season. It's worth checking whether your website, and the machines reading it, are keeping up.
Fancy finding out where you actually stand?
Checking your own site takes minutes, not months. Whether you do it yourself or hand it to whoever manages your website, here's where to go next.
- Already part of our Community?
Head to our knowledge base for guidance on Event schema and AI visibility. - Want to go beyond your website?
Join our free webinar on AI policy, ethics and practical everyday use for venues, 17 November. Save your seat. - Not sure what your results mean?
We're happy to talk it through with you. Get in touch. - Curious how CultureSuite handles all of this by default?
Book a demo. - Keep exploring
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