ITC Vegas, organised by Clarion Events US, is one of the largest and most established events in the insurtech sector bringing together 9000 attendees each year in Las Vegas, USA.

Ranking number one on Google for its own name, by any conventional measure it was performing well in search. But Clarion's team wanted to go further - understanding not just how the event ranked, but how it was actually appearing to people using AI tools to find it. When we looked at that picture, things looked different.

The starting point

In May 2026 we captured a baseline. Three things stood out.

• The event appeared in roughly 1 in 20 AI answers, and sat behind smaller competitor conferences on category questions.
   
• ITC Vegas is the event name most people use - but its formal name is InsureTech Connect, and both were appearing across the website. Search engines and AI were treating them as two separate events entirely, splitting the brand's authority in half rather than building it behind one clear identity.
   
• Homepage impressions were down year on year - reflecting a wider industry shift as AI-generated answers absorb search traffic that would previously have reached event websites directly. It was one of the key reasons the work focused on AI visibility from the outset.

The event wasn't invisible - sentiment was 95% positive wherever it appeared. It was just harder to find than it should have been and smaller competitors were benefiting from that.

What we did

Over ten weeks, from May to July 2026, ASP's performance team focused on three straightforward changes to the site's content and structure.

• Rebuilt the homepage to give AI what it needs to surface the event confidently - dates, venue, audience and price, clearly structured and easy to extract.
   
• Standardised the event name across page titles, headings, structured data and body copy, with ITC Vegas as the lead name and InsureTech Connect stated clearly as the formal name where relevant.
   
• Rewrote the core event pages - including event details, registration, agenda, speakers and who attends - to answer the questions buyers actually search for, leading with clear, specific copy that both search engines and AI engines reward.
   

The results

AI search appearances more than doubled.

	18–31 May	12–25 July
AI search appearances	4,655	10,093
AI share of all search appearances	5.3%	17.3%

Source: Google Search Console generative AI performance report, comparing 18 to 31 May with 12 to 25 July 2026.

That is a 117% increase in AI appearances and a shift from roughly 1 in 20 of the event’s search appearances happening inside an AI answer to roughly 1 in 5.

Results like these rarely come immediately - it typically takes weeks for search engines and AI systems to process and reflect changes to a website. For the first five weeks, numbers stayed flat. Then, in the week of 22 June, visibility increased sharply and has remained at that level since.

One figure helps explain why. Of the 978 pages on the website now cited by Google's AI surfaces, six in ten citations point to the homepage - the page we rebuilt. That gives us confidence the improvement came from the work rather than wider changes in the market.

At the same time, traditional search strengthened:

• Brand name clicks up 116%, from searches for the event by name
• Click rate up 30% year on year
• Average position improved from 6.5 to 2.2 following the naming fix
• New question-shaped searches appeared for the first time: "when is itc", "what is itc conference", "itc dates". These are exactly the questions AI systems are built to answer.
   

What comes next

The first phase of this work focused on making ITC Vegas easier to find by name. The next phase is about making it discoverable by need - appearing in the conversations happening in the insurance sector year-round, not just when someone already knows the event exists.

For any event, that means creating content that answers the broader questions your audience is already asking, so your event becomes part of the conversation long before registration opens.

Being ranked isn't the same as being found
ITC Vegas ranked number one on Google and still appeared in just 1 in 20 AI answers. Strong Google rankings and strong AI visibility are no longer the same thing - but the work that improves one now directly influences the other.

If your event is in a similar position, the gap is unlikely to close on its own. The good news is that the changes that improve AI visibility are the same ones that strengthen traditional search - and as this work shows, the impact can come faster than you might expect.

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A note on the numbers:

• These figures cover Google only, specifically AI Overviews and AI Mode. They don't measure visibility in ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity, which we'd recommend tracking separately.
• The figures show impressions, not clicks - Google doesn't yet publish click data for AI surfaces.
• A Google core update landed in May within the measurement window, and Google expanded AI surfaces to more markets during the period, which will have lifted figures across the board to some degree.
• The fact that six in ten AI citations point to the one page we rebuilt is the strongest available evidence that the improvement came from the work itself..

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We’ll show you how your event currently appears in Google’s AI answers, where you’re losing visibility to competitors, and what to change first.

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