Are Third-Party Widgets Hiding Your Speakers and Exhibitors?
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Your speakers and exhibitors are some of the most valuable content on your event website. People search for them by name, by company and by topic. But if they're shown through a third-party widget, there's a good chance Google and AI tools can't see them at all.
In our September webinar, Is Your Event Invisible to AI?, Jon Monk, Head of Performance at ASP, flagged this as a fairly big issue. Here's what to check and what to do about it.
Many organisers use widgets from other platforms to display speakers and exhibitors. They often look great, but the problem is how they load.
Most widgets use JavaScript to pull content onto the page after it opens. Search engines and AI tools tend to land on a page, grab what they can quickly and move on. If your speaker list hasn't loaded by then, as far as they're concerned, it isn't there.
Recent research backs this up. In one experiment reported by Search Engine Land, an SEO put half of his site's links behind JavaScript and tracked 27 crawlers over 41 days. Only two followed the JavaScript links, and both were Google's. Even then, Googlebot reached just 2% of those pages. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Bingbot and Perplexity found none of them.
It's one experiment on one site, so treat the exact numbers with care. But the direction is clear. Exhibitor directories, speaker profiles and session listings are the pages most likely to be built this way, and they're also the pages buyers ask AI tools about.
You don't need any tools for this. Open your website, click into an individual speaker or exhibitor profile and look at the URL.
- /speakers/jane-smith or /exhibitors/company-name is a real page. Search engines and AI tools can find and read it.
- /speakers#jane-smith or /exhibitors#company-name is a warning sign. A hash (#) usually means the content is loaded by JavaScript, so there's a good chance Google and AI tools can't see it.
A hash doesn't always mean there's a problem, but it's worth a closer look.
For a second check, open your exhibitor list, right-click and choose View page source. Then search (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) for the name of an exhibitor on the list. If it isn't in the source code, it's being added by JavaScript.
Speaker and exhibitor pages quietly bring in traffic all year round. People search for a speaker they want to hear, or a supplier they want to meet, and find your event as a result.
Working with one client, Jon found that speaker pages were a hidden source of organic traffic across several of their event websites. That traffic is free. Over a year, it can be worth a sizeable amount in equivalent pay-per-click (PPC) spend.
If those pages are hidden in JavaScript, you lose that traffic. You also lose the chance for AI tools to mention your speakers and exhibitors when people ask about your sector.
The best practice is to give every speaker and exhibitor their own real page on your website, built with your website's native functionality rather than a widget.
On ASP websites, speakers and exhibitors are built in as standard. If your data lives in another platform, that's no problem. It can usually be connected through an integration, so the content appears as proper pages on your site.
Already an ASP client? In your Back Office, open the options for your speaker and exhibitor modules or libraries and find How to open links to entries. Make sure it's set to Direct, not Modal. With Modal, AI tools can't see your speaker or exhibitor pages.
Not sure where you stand? Run the URL check above on a few profiles today. If you spot a hash, get in touch and we can take a look.