By Jon Monk, Head of Performance

Search doesn't sit still, and this summer things have moved more than most. If you run an event website, here are the three changes that are worth ten minutes of your time this month. None of them need a developer or a website overhaul. Here's what happened, why it matters, and what to check.

Your FAQ sections are being read differently now

One of the simplest wins on an event website is a well-written set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). Answer "is the show free to attend", "where is the venue", "what are the opening hours" clearly enough and Google would lift your answer straight into the People Also Ask box, with a link back to your page.

That box has changed. Analysis of 19.2 million English-language People Also Ask questions found that 97% of answers in the first week of September were AI-generated overviews, up from 86% in August and around 12% just fourteen months ago. Around the same time, Google's own John Mueller acknowledged publicly that the old idea of a ranking "position 1 to 10" is now hard to map to anything useful.

The FAQ format itself hasn't stopped working. If anything, it matters more, because AI answers are made up of exactly this kind of plain question-and-answer content. What's changed is the reward. A good FAQ used to earn a box with a link next to it. Now it's more likely to earn a place inside the AI-written answer itself, sometimes with the link, sometimes without.

What to do:

• Search your five most common visitor questions in an incognito browser window, things like "is the show free to attend" or "where is it held".
• For each one, check whether the answer comes from an AI overview, and whether your site is cited as a source.
• Where you're not cited, find the page that should answer that question, and make sure the answer sits in one plain sentence near the top, with the question as a clear heading.
   

The content that performs best isn't written by your marketing team alone

Orbit Media's annual survey of over 1,000 content marketers, now in its twelfth year, found that only 14% of marketers report strong results from their content this year, the lowest figure the survey has recorded. AI adoption among the same marketers reached 92%, and showed no link to results either way. Writing content faster didn't make it perform better.

What did predict strong results was a set of practices fewer teams now use: original research, formal editing by a person, and working with outside experts. Marketers who regularly collaborated with experts were 2.6 times more likely to report strong results, though only 7% now do, down from 25% in 2017.

Separately, LinkedIn's own data on what its content earns citations from AI assistants tells a similar story. Long-form articles and newsletters earn around 60% of AI citations from the platform, against roughly 40% for short posts. A related study of 9.5 million AI citations across business-to-business (B2B) categories found that three-quarters came from individual profiles, not company pages.

For an event, that's a genuine opportunity rather than a problem. Every event has speakers and exhibitors with real expertise attached to their name, and most of them have never been asked to write anything.

What to do:

• Ask three confirmed speakers or exhibitors for one short article each on their session topic, around 800 to 1,200 words, published under their own name.
• Publish it on your own website first, with a clear summary at the top and one supporting fact or figure.
• If they're comfortable sharing a version on their own LinkedIn profile afterwards, that's a bonus, not a replacement.
   

Your PDF brochure might already be invisible to Google

Google has started showing noticeably fewer PDF files in its results. Practitioners tracking the change report PDFs that remain indexed but have effectively stopped appearing, with previously well-performing files dropping from hundreds of clicks to close to zero. Google hasn't commented on the cause, and it isn't yet fully understood, so this one to watch.

For event organisers, this matters because brochures, agendas, floor plans and exhibitor packs are routinely published as PDFs. If a PDF is the only place a piece of information exists, and PDFs are becoming harder to find, that information effectively disappears from search.

What to do:

• In Google Search Console, filter your performance report to URLs containing ".pdf" and compare impressions over the last 28 days against the previous 28.
• If a file has dropped sharply, don't rely on it as the only source for anything a visitor needs before registering.
• Publish the same content as a normal web page as well, and keep the PDF as an optional download from that page.
   

The pattern behind all three

None of this changes what good event marketing has always looked like: clear, specific, well-sourced content that answers a real question. What's changed is which formats currently get rewarded for doing that well, and it's worth ten minutes a month to check you're not quietly losing ground on things like this that used to work without question.

We track changes like these every week as part of our performance work with event organisers. If you'd like a straight, no-pitch look at how your own event currently shows up in AI and organic search, get in touch.