2026 Update: The Impact of AI Overviews in the Cultural Sector
A year ago, we published our first report on how Google's AI Overviews were affecting search traffic for arts and cultural organisations.
We'd noticed that organic search traffic was falling for some organisations and wanted to know what the wider picture looked like.
We analysed the same 100 UK cultural organisations and, predictably enough, found that search traffic was overwhelmingly down. We also saw an inflection point around the end of March 2025, which tallied with their expansion into results for searches related to entertainment, restaurants, and travel.
At the time, we said it was likely that search traffic would dip further. With Google increasingly becoming an 'answer engine' rather than a search engine, we needed to accept the reduction in website visitors as the new normal and act accordingly.
It’s a year on from that report, and we wanted to check in and see how things stand now. So we repeated the study, collecting data for the same 100 UK cultural organisations and comparing January to July 2026 with the same period in 2025.
Here are the headlines
Cultural websites now see less traffic from organic search. In fact, search traffic is down 18% year on year. That's a second consecutive year of decline, and a steeper drop than the one we reported last time.
79 of the 100 organisations in our dataset saw their search traffic fall. That's almost exactly the same proportion as last year. And as with last year’s report, while some organisations have been less affected, most of these can be explained by particular circumstances
Visibility within AI Overviews has grown, which is a welcome bit of good news. Although how useful this is isn’t clearr - it doesn't seem to be translating into significant levels of website traffic.
Download the full report
What you've read here is a snapshot. The full report has more detail with:
charts showing the scale of the change,
the names of the organisations that are most visible in AI Overview, and
practical steps you can take to react and adapt to these changes.
Download: The Impact of AI Overviews in the Cultural Sector - 2026 Update (PDF)
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