2026 Update: The Impact of AI Overviews in the Cultural Sector
Last year, we published a report showing how Google's AI Overviews were affecting search traffic for arts and culture organisations.
We had seen that organic search traffic had decreased for some organisations and wanted to find out how widespread the effect was.
We analysed data for 100 UK cultural organisations and found that search traffic was overwhelmingly down. There was also an inflection point around the end of March 2025 that coincided with AI Overviews’ expansion to cover 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 and adjust to the new normal.
We’ve now repeated our study, one year later, to see how things stand now.
We looked at data for the same 100 UK cultural organisations and compared January to July 2026 with the same period in 2025 (the period of the last report).
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 clear. 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.
- 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)
Need some help?
If you’d like to increase the visibility of your organisation online, or evolve your content strategy in light of these changes, drop us a line.
If you’re interested in more insights like this, sign up to our newsletter.