What a visitor types before they book: ninety days of searches on our event pages

We publish events free of charge, and we can see what happens to them afterwards in Google Search Console. This article reports one window of that record: 22 July to 19 October 2026, read on 28 October 2026. It covers every search that reached a page under /events/ on this site. Each figure below carries the date it was read, because a measurement without a date stops being a measurement a few months later.

The short version: almost nobody searches for an event. They search for a name.

What the window holds

Start with the side that works. In those ninety days the pages of places on this site were shown 1,482,421 times and clicked 13,699 times, at an average position of 14.7. Set against the previous ninety days, 23 April to 21 July 2026, that is four times the clicks, a rise of 403 per cent, and 95 per cent more impressions. The archive grew 43 per cent over the same stretch, so this is not only a matter of having more pages: page for page, a place was seen 36 per cent more often than three months earlier. (All of it read on 28 October 2026.)

Now the other side, and it is the reason this article exists. In the same window our event pages sat at an average position of 8.7 — six positions better than our place pages — and were seen a small fraction as often. We published 56 per cent more event pages between the two windows, and their impressions rose 11 per cent. Per page, in other words, the visibility of an event fell by roughly 29 per cent. Adding event pages does not add audience. Ranking first for a question nobody asks returns nothing at all.

Page for page, across those ninety days, a page of a place was seen about twenty-one times more often than a page of an event.

The four searches that do arrive

Query by query, the traffic that reaches an event page falls into four kinds, and "events in Tuscany" is not one of them. Not once, in ninety days.

1. The name of the event, often with the year attached. The busiest query in the window was taormina arte festival 2026, at average position 3.6. Beside it in the same group: taormina arte 2026, festival taormina arte 2026, static cinema venice, static cinema 2026. Whoever types a festival programme like this already knows the festival exists. They are not discovering it. They want this year’s dates and this year’s ticket page.

2. The building, plus a word about getting in. ancient theatre of taormina tickets. It is rare, and commercially it is the most valuable line on the list. Someone searching a venue’s name together with tickets, opening hours or how to visit has already decided to go. They are looking for the door, not for inspiration.

3. A person’s name. william of sens, 180 impressions. giuseppe sommaruga. ernst von siemens kunststiftung. botero palermo. Somebody reads a name, wants to know who that was, and lands on an event because the event is about them.

4. A film that was shot there. This is the strangest group and the largest. where was kingdom of heaven filmed brought 583 impressions, kingdom of heaven filming locations another 222, kingdom of heaven essaouira sat at position 3.5. for your eyes only meteora, 142 impressions. castle from chitty chitty bang bang. Nobody in that group was looking for an event. They were looking for a location they had seen on a screen, and they found a page that happened to describe it.

What an organiser can do with this

Three things follow, and none of them costs money.

Write the names people already type. If the only proper noun on your page is the name of your festival, the page is reachable only by people who already know your festival. Name the building. Name the town. Name the architect, the painter, the composer, the film. Those are the words with existing demand, and they are usually true of your event anyway.

Put the year in. Three of the five most-clicked searches in our window carry it. People searching for a recurring event do not trust a page that could be last year’s.

Expect the visitor to arrive sideways. Someone who arrives from where was kingdom of heaven filmed did not come for you, and will give you about four seconds. The first two lines and the photograph decide whether they stay. A poster with the text baked into the image reads as nothing on a phone.

What this does not prove

It is ninety days on one site, and Search Console reports a sample rather than a census. Our record on this property opens in June 2026, so a same-season comparison with last year does not exist, and we are not going to estimate one. Many of our event listings are also young: a page that went online in September has had no time to accumulate anything. We also cannot tell you what any of this is worth in bookings, because we have not measured a single paid booking through our own till: that part is honestly unknown, and we would rather say so than estimate it.

What the window does establish is the shape of the demand, and the shape holds across every query in it. People do not browse for culture by category. They type a name they have already heard, and they arrive on whatever page carries that name well.