AI Visibility in Events: What We Uncovered at SISO with CloserStill Media
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Earlier this month in Seattle, I sat down with Shanna Allen, Director of Marketing at CloserStill Media, at the SISO Leadership Conference to talk about something I think every senior event leader needs to be thinking about right now. How AI is changing the way audiences, exhibitors and sponsors discover events - and what the commercial consequences are when your event is not visible in that landscape.
When CloserStill tested their own AI Visibility
Shanna started her AI visibility journey the same way I would encourage every organiser to start theirs. She typed one of her own events into ChatGPT and asked it what came back.
The result was not what she expected. ChatGPT effectively rated the website poorly. The content was incomplete, poorly structured and not readable enough for AI to understand and represent the event accurately. This was not a small, under-resourced show. This was a well-established event from one of the world's leading event groups.
That gap between how good the event actually is and how AI represents it is the problem we were there to talk about.
What Shanna did next is what makes her experience so useful for other organisers. She didn't call in a developer or commission a technical overhaul. She used ChatGPT to audit the sites herself, identified what was missing and made content-based changes. Persona-specific pages that answered the real questions visitors, exhibitors and sponsors were asking. FAQ sections structured so AI could find and cite the answers. Improved internal linking so AI could navigate between related content. Richer, more detailed exhibitor and sponsor profiles.
And the scale of the work? In Shanna's words: "It was 70% me." Once she had one site complete she handed it to a colleague with the ChatGPT project and the brief, and they replicated it across the other sites. No developers. No technical resource. Just focused content work.
The results are already coming through. Since May, when analytics started including AI traffic, Shanna has been able to see registrations and revenue coming through specifically via ChatGPT. And when she tested the sites again after the work, all three had moved from a C to D minus up to an A grade.
The stat that stopped the room
Before we got into the data, I asked the room how many had ever searched for their own event in ChatGPT or Perplexity to see what comes back. About half the hands went up. More than I might have expected - but still only half. And the half that did not raise their hand told me everything about the opportunity that still exists.
94% of B2B buyers now use generative AI during their purchase process (6sense, 2025 Buyer Experience Report). That's not a forecast, it's the reality of the market right now.
Your delegates may research events in all kinds of ways. But your exhibitors and sponsors are B2B buyers. They are using AI to evaluate which shows deserve their budget before they ever speak to your sales team. If what comes back about your event is thin, vague, or simply wrong, that commercial conversation may never start.
And here is the point that I think landed hardest in the room. Churn is a certainty with events - for Shanna's portfolio it's around 50% of event attendees that are new each cycle. The existing audience will find you. They are on your list, they know your brand, they will come back. The commercial risk is always in the new audience. The exhibitor who has never heard of your show. The delegate who does not know your conference exists. The sponsor evaluating where to put their investment this year.
Those people are not opening your emails. They are starting somewhere else. And increasingly, that somewhere else is an AI tool.
This is not a marketing problem
One of the most important things Shanna said - and one that I think will stay with people from the session - is that she didn't initially know why she felt something needed to change. She acted on instinct before the data told her to. She described it simply: if she was using AI to search, everyone else was too.
That instinct was right. And the fact that she acted on it before the traffic dropped is what separates the organisers who will lead this shift from the ones who will follow it.
But the session also made clear that AI visibility is not something that can be delegated to a marketing exec and left there. The consequences of poor AI discoverability sit across the whole organisation. Attendance targets. Exhibitor pipeline. Sponsor credibility. If AI cannot find your event or cannot represent it accurately, every commercial function feels it eventually.
This is a leadership conversation. Which is exactly why it belonged at SISO.
What every event leader needs to know
Shanna and I also covered the practical side of things - what to actually do, and where to start. For anyone who was not in the room, here is the version I would share with every event leader right now.
Getting your content right is the foundation. But AI does not read your website in isolation. It reads every website in your sector and decides which one is the most authoritative source. The competitive landscape inside AI search is more intense than traditional search, not less. On Google, you competed for a position on a results page. In AI search, there is often one answer. One event gets recommended.
The organisers building AI authority now are not just solving today's problem. They are building something that compounds over time and is genuinely hard for late movers to displace.
Before your next event cycle starts, do one thing. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and search for your event - but not on your own device. AI will already know who you are and tailor the results accordingly, so you will not get a true picture. Use your spouse's phone or a friend's laptop, somewhere AI does not associate with you, so you get an honest answer.
Then search the way a potential attendee, exhibitor, or sponsor would. Not just your event name. Ask the problem. Who should attend this? Which shows should I exhibit at in this sector? What does sponsoring this event include?
What comes back is your current AI reputation. That is your starting point.
If you would like to understand exactly where you stand and what to fix first, we can help.
The AI Visibility Playbook
Everyone at SISO left with a copy of our AI Visibility and Event Discoverability Playbook. It covers ten practical actions that any event organiser can take right now - no technical expertise required.
From keeping your best-performing content alive and turning session recordings into articles, through to writing complete speaker and exhibitor profiles and auditing your own AI visibility. If you would like a copy, you can download it here.