It all starts with ensuring your digital footprint—your website, social media accounts, Google reviews, and, yes, your Eventective profile—is current and tailored to the kind of things planners will be looking for when they are searching.
While this is of critical importance to your business, it’s hardly a revelation. Our research from the beginning of this year featured some interesting emerging trends—for example, declining budgets and shifting mores around weddings, and sky-high expectations around response times for Gen Z—but the basic evaluation criteria planners use wasn’t among them.
What planners want to see when they’re conducting their research hasn’t materially shifted. And, really, why would it? People want the same thing out of parties, weddings, and meetings as they did five, 10, or even 15 years ago. They will, in turn, use a wide array of digital sources to vet the businesses they think might be able to meet their needs. Ever since the Internet became ubiquitous, it has been true that you can’t exactly win business in this “discovery” phase, but you can certainly lose it.
What is new and different about that phase of the customer journey in 2026 is the potential role of artificial intelligence. In this article, we’ll cut through all the hype and hot takes to help you understand how AI actually changes the calculus of marketing your event business.
Let’s start by sidestepping all the oft-toxic debate about whether or how AI will change the general economy and the way we work.
Instead, let’s live in the here and now. There might come a day when AI agents do everything from source venues to sign agreements on behalf of a planner, but our research indicates that that day isn’t tomorrow. Only 36% of planners we surveyed at the end of last year used AI at all in their search process. That’s right: more than two-thirds of planners weren’t using AI at all as of the end of last year. Even those who did, tended to use it at the very beginning of their search, leaning on it for inspiration, idea generation, etc.
In other words, the people using AI to plan their event are a minority—possibly a quickly growing one, but still very much a minority.
This tracks closely with general adoption of tools like ChatGPT and Claude. Fewer than 1 in 4 Americans use an AI chatbot on a daily basis, according to Pew Research. More than half don’t use them at all, a figure that may not shrink as much as you might think, given the growing backlash to AI in some corners. For all of the hype, the reality is that AI is still not central to the habits of consumers.
What AI changes, and what it doesn't
That said, the definition of "using AI" has become increasingly murky as AI becomes more embedded in familiar interfaces like Google's search results. Google's AI overviews were rolled out to all U.S. search users in May 2024, and they have had a seismic impact on search behavior. More than 68 percent of Google searches now end without a click—meaning users are, more often than not, getting the information they were after in the search engine results page (SERP) without ever venturing beyond to the open web (aka your website).
One very wrong interpretation of this state of affairs would be to read this as handwriting on the wall, and to slim down your business website, and try to game it out so that your entire digital footprint is focused exclusively on garnering citations from ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude when planners are on the hunt in your area.
This would be very foolish for two reasons: (a) most people still aren’t using these tools, either at all or with any meaningful regularity, and (b) it’s utterly decoupled from the messy reality of how consumers “shop.”
Even people who talk to ChatGPT all day long are probably going to want to visit your website and your social media handles as they get more and more serious about booking your venue and/or your services. On the other hand, they probably aren’t going to leave their chat window (or will happily rely on Google’s AI overviews) if they are simply trying to figure out whether you’re ADA compliant or if your bar can handle a weekend baby shower as well as it does trivia nights.
That, fundamentally, is what AI has actually changed for those who are using it. You can ask far more nuanced, detailed questions than you would in a traditional search query and expect a similarly nuanced, detailed answer without necessarily needing to click into another website.
So, sorry, but you’re not off the hook. You still need a nice-looking website, an up-to-date Eventective profile, polished social handles, etc. What you need to add on top is the kind of structured, query-oriented content that can be sourced by these new tools, with their ability to respond directly to more complex questions. Underneath it all, you also need a system to ensure what you have out there stays current and accurate.
Getting over feeling overwhelmed
If simply thinking about “structured, query-oriented content” makes you want to take deep breaths into a paper bag, let us first say that … we totally get it. Our own marketing team here at Eventective has days when it feels overwhelmed by the prospect of having to master yet another digital discipline.
What we do suggest, after a few deep breaths into that bag, is to keep in mind that large language models are a paradigm shift in the way information is delivered, not in the kind of information potential customers are seeking.
That hypothetical planner trying to figure out if your bar can do a baby shower still would have had the same basic questions five years ago, and they would still have leaned on your total digital footprint (website, social media, marketplace profiles, reviews, Reddit, etc.) to get their answer. The difference is that now they also have a chatbot at their disposal to synthesize all of that information for them.
Of course, having a chatbot synthesize reams of information isn’t just for planners. Our FAQ generator can read through your website and the messages you have exchanged with planners in your Eventective inbox to generate the kind of “structured, query-oriented content” that other planners will certainly be seeking out. What might have taken weeks or months to get around to can now be live on your Eventective profile in a matter of minutes (once you’ve reviewed its output and made any adjustments).
Pair that with our outreach team and account managers who see thousands of business profiles every week—the very best, the cautionary tales, and everything in between—and there’s plenty we can do to help ensure your profile shines, whether for human eyes or for machine parsing.
In our next article, we’ll go beyond the proverbial shop window and talk about how you go from a planner’s shortlist to top choice in a hypercompetitive environment. In the meantime, feel free to reach out to our team to talk about sharpening your presence, or read the rest of the series below.
