Google’s AI Search Shift: The Current State of SEM
2026 Arts Marketing Priorities
AUTHOR:
Capacity
As we kick off 2026, it’s worth pausing to ask a simple but important question: What did 2025 teach us about where arts marketers should focus next?
Last year wasn’t easy. We can see this in the SMU DataArts National Trends Analysis, which drew from data across more than 6,500 organizations and put hard numbers behind what many teams already feel day to day:
- Overall spending declined in 2024
- Staff counts dropped to a six-year low, with both full- and part-time roles shrinking
However:
- Paid audience attendance rose 13% and free audience attendance 22%
- Payments to artists declined far less than other personnel costs
That last point matters. Even under pressure, organizations continued investing in creative labor. Audiences came back, creativity flourished, and organizations continued adapting in thoughtful, strategic ways
At the same time, marketers are more stretched than ever. Content demands are up. Platforms are multiplying. Expectations haven’t eased. The takeaway isn’t “do more,” but rather work smarter: find efficiencies without losing clarity or humanity.
Looking across the work, research, and partnerships that shaped 2025, a few themes rose to the top. Not trends for trend’s sake, but signals—about how people discover art, and where effort matters most.
We’re taking a commitment to keeping audiences front and center with us into 2026.
The throughline in all of these learnings is a need to stay focused on customers and their changing behaviors and needs.
AI Is Actively Changing How People Discover You
Search behavior shifted in 2025 in ways that are already impossible to ignore.
More and more patrons of arts organizations are using tools like ChatGPT not as novelties, but as default discovery engines. Today, 27% of consumers use generative AI for at least half of their online searches.
That means arts organizations must think beyond keywords and rankings, and start asking:
- What questions might someone ask ChatGPT about us?
- How clearly does our website answer those questions?
- Are we visible in places AI tools already trust?
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) isn’t just about your own site, either. Trusted third-party platforms play a growing role, too.
Take TripAdvisor. It’s not only for restaurants and zoos—it’s a powerful discovery and credibility signal for museums, theaters, dance companies, symphonies, and performing arts centers alike. That credibility signaling impacts your nearest and dearest patrons, not just the tourists who might be seeing you on TripAdvisor directly.
Visibility now depends on clarity, consistency, and authority across the ecosystem.
SMART INVESTMENT MEANS THINKING BEYOND THE SAME TWO PLATFORMS
One of the clearest lessons from 2025: reach and growth don’t come from over-relying on a narrow channel mix. Research from Neil Patel’s NP Digital shows incremental ROI increases as organizations invest across up to five platforms—before diminishing returns appear. That makes a strong case for expanding thoughtfully, not endlessly.
Image Credit: Neil Patel
Expand Your Digital Strategy
Your prospective audience members and visitors aren’t on only one (or three) digital platforms. You shouldn’t be, either.
Digital Out of Home & Connected TV: Awareness Really Matters
Awareness is the first step in every audience journey, and it’s often undervalued.
- In May 2025, streaming surpassed cable and broadcast TV, accounting for 45% of total TV usage
- Streaming time has grown over 70% since 2021
- Digital OOH spending climbed by 9.2% year-over-year to reach 36% of sales as of September 2025 (compared to an initial projected compound annual growth rate of 2.2%).
- DOOH ad recall (13%) far outpaces other digital formats
The most effective strategies pair awareness with intent capture—CTV alongside retargeting, or DOOH alongside strong search and conversion campaigns.
Reddit: Unduplicated, Engaged, and Underused
TikTok: Awareness That Plants Long-Term Seeds
Streaming Audio: Reaching Who Social Can’t
Content Is the New Targeting
The biggest creative shift of 2025 was this: content itself now determines who sees your work.
Platforms no longer rely primarily on demographic boxes. They respond to resonance. Ensuring that you are speaking to your widest possible audience means creating your widest possible array of content.
That’s why scalable strategies incorporate multiple content types:
- Influencer and creator-driven content
- User-generated and first-person content
- Classic Content (your show art, artist interviews, cast announcements, etc. – we don’t have to throw away what already works!)
And increasingly, lo-fi content can drive big wins–not everything needs to be high-production to be high-impact (think: smartphone photos, Notes app screenshots, casual videos and recaps).
AI Helps Find Efficiency — Not Replace People
At Capacity, we hold a firm line on this: AI should enhance human creativity and strategy, not replace it. The real opportunity in AI isn’t automation for automation’s sake—it’s relieving pressure where teams are already stretched, so humans can focus on the work only humans can do.
A strong example of this balance comes from our email project with Boston Gay Men’s Chorus:
- Irreplaceable human work came first: our team built a detailed strategy across all 16 emails—defining audience segments, cadence, core messages, and supporting details.
- AI acted as a collaborator rather than a decision-maker. AI supported drafting, suggested alternate angles, flagged repetition risks, proposed subject line variations, and helped accelerate iteration.
Strategy stayed human. Execution became more efficient. And audiences had the opportunity to truly be delighted by varied, creative messaging that resonated with different people for different reasons.
We saw a similar dynamic with San Francisco Opera. Faced with a long-standing challenge—9 out of 10 first-time ticket buyers disappearing before season’s end—the organization partnered with Capacity to explore how AI could function as a true strategic partner. Using proprietary audience data (with all appropriate privacy protections), we built AI-driven audience profiles that helped guide more tailored messaging and smarter testing. The result wasn’t generic personalization—it was faster insight, clearer patterns, and more confident decision-making, and audiences are the ones to benefit, especially the newest folks in the community.
The lesson from 2025 is clear: AI is most powerful when it’s used to amplify expertise, not bypass it. And because this space is evolving rapidly, it’s one we all need to keep watching. That’s why Capacity publishes Q&AI, a regular newsletter tracking what’s changing, what’s useful, and what’s worth questioning (follow it on our blog or on LinkedIn).
Human Collaboration Is Still the Throughline
For all the technological change in 2025, the most impactful work still shared one constant: strong human collaboration. Staying patron-focused (or even patron-obsessed) requires thinking and acting outside of our routine silos to represent critical outside viewpoints.
Internal Collaboration
With artistic teams
Marketers play a vital role as translators. Marketers understand audience segments, messaging frameworks, and the mechanics of attention. In collaborating with artistic teams, our job isn’t to teach marketing—it’s to help surface meaning by asking the right questions:
- What excites you most about this work?
- Why did you choose it for this program?
- How would you describe it to your best friend? A parent? A child?
- Why should someone leave their home to experience this?
With programming teams
It’s increasingly important to acknowledge that today’s artists don’t work in silos. Composers choreograph. Theater makers integrate digital media. Musicians create visual installations. When organizations force rigid genre definitions, they don’t just limit programming—they limit possibility.
- Listening to artists
- Starting with small experiments
- Auditing language
- Examining decision-making structures
- Rethinking artist development
When programming reflects how artists actually work, audiences follow.
With development teams
The bottom line is the recognition that patrons and donors are often the same people. Marketing teams excel at understanding the voice of the audience. Development teams bring curiosity, relationship-building, and an eye for value in small moments. When those strengths complement one another, organizations stop making assumptions and start building trust.
Externally: Strong Partnerships Fuel Better Work
Collaboration with external partners matters more than ever. Arts organizations are being asked to create more content—more video, more frequently, with more partners. While the work is emotional and human, communication around it often becomes purely logistical.
But here’s the truth: when a client is kind, appreciative, and trusting, the work doesn’t stop at a project management system. It follows creative partners into walks, commutes, and quiet moments—where the best ideas tend to surface.
On every kickoff call, there’s one question creatives care about more than any other: Why are we making this? When that answer is clear, the work gets better.
Looking Ahead
The landscape is still changing. Teams are still being asked to do more with less. But 2025 showed us something important: there are efficiencies to be found, audiences to reach, and so many reasons to be hopeful, and even excited.
Staying curious and thoughtful about the audiences you are reaching is critical. Meet them where they are–on the platforms and in the formats that are most resonant to them.
As we head into 2026, we’re here to help you navigate what’s next—with smarter strategies, clearer storytelling, and collaboration that actually lightens the load.
Let’s dive into the year ahead together.
