An increasing number of people are adopting an AI Chatbot like ChatGPT as their new way of searching for answers. While Google search and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram still dominate as marketplaces to find events, AI is growing rapidly. Here is the source of traffic from AI since the beginning of 2025:
While still an immaterial source of traffic on RunSignup, less than 0.2%, the growth will be interesting to watch. We would speculate it becomes the #3 after Google and Meta before the end of the year.
As we have made clear, 2025 is the Year of AI for RunSignup and our customers, and this is just another indicator of what the future will look like.
What is RunSignup Doing to Optimize AI Search?
We have been watching the AI crawlers from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic mature over the past 6 months. They are still making mistakes, and not nearly as efficient at Google. However, we believe that they will become as advanced as Google, as well as closer to real-time. We are ensuring that all event websites on our platform are optimized for the AI crawlers so that they find results on RunSignup easily and display them to users. For example, Bob’s ChatGPT knows where he lives and does a search smartly with lots of information taken from the RunSignup hosted website:
Like all AI technology, this capability is still in it’s infancy. Today’s AI search is the worst AI search you will ever use (it will get better and better). So not all events will appear and it might not answer your questions correctly, or it might hallucinate. But the fact is more and more people are using AI to find events.
Summary
RunSignup has a natural advantage as becoming the trusted source for the AI Chatbots. They will learn (or may already know) that RunSignup is where over half of races are listed, and has high quality scores in terms of performance and link references. These are the same advantages events get from Google searches.