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Book a demoSix tests to put to your CMS as AI search changes club websites
First Team Consultancy and Glide Publishing Platform have collaborated on a new report for football clubs, Your website’s new job. Here we focus on one part of it: what changing search behaviour means for the people who publish and maintain a club website day to day.
A supporter wants to know where to park for Saturday's game. They type the question into Google, read a summary at the top of the results, and head for the car. Your matchday guide provided the question, but nobody visited your site.
That pattern is spreading. Pew's research found that people clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits where an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% where it didn't. SparkToro's analysis of UK search puts the wider picture starkly: around seven in ten searches between January and April this year ended without any click at all.
None of this means supporters have stopped searching for your club. Google says query volumes are at record levels. It means more searching does not necessarily mean more visits to your website, which forces a harder question. If visits are no longer the whole story, how does this change the purpose of your website and how do you judge whether it’s doing its job?
Start by asking what each page is for
The report's answer is a framework called AID (Attract, Inform, Deliver). Instead of one traffic number for the whole site, you ask what each page is supposed to achieve:
| Page | Its main job | The question to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Academy player feature | Attract | Does it give your supporters something only your club can provide, and a reason to return or explore more? |
| Fixture and matchday pages | Inform | Can your supporters find the current, reliable answer quickly? |
| Hospitality enquiry form | Deliver | Can someone finish it without getting stuck? |
Seen this way, a fixture page with falling clicks may still be working well, because its information is being surfaced in search, while a hospitality journey where people drop out halfway is a clear problem, however healthy the traffic looks.
Once a club knows what its pages should achieve, the next question is practical: can the team act on it?
Six tasks to hand your CMS supplier
The report lists everyday club tasks to put to your platform team or CMS supplier, each with a description of a workable answer.
- Change a fixture venue. Do the changes populate across all pages the information is listed? Are you able to see every page that still needs attention?
- Keep membership advice current. Are you able to see who owns the page, when it was last checked and whether it needs updating?
- Correct a player quotation. How challenging is it to find every published version, correct each one and check the live pages?
- Reuse a historic interview. How long does it take (and number of steps) to find the interview, check permission to repurpose it, and link it to new coverage?
- Improve hospitality enquiries. Are you able to see where people abandon the journey and whether completed enquiries reach the right team?
- Publish a fixture change in every language. Do the changes automatically update across all languages you offer your site? If not, are you able to see which versions still need review?
Ask for a live demonstration using your own content, and watch how much effort each one takes.
Each of these six tasks depend on a handful of capabilities. A CMS that has them lets teams finish tasks in a few steps, and one that lacks them leaves someone checking pages one by one. These are worth watching for during the demonstration.
- Multilingual publishing. Does your CMS support auto translation and multilingual interfaces?
- Metadata and archive reuse. Is your CMS built to automate metadata and editing tasks and enforce business rules?
- Guardrails and ownership. Can CMS enforce article-type rules and block progression until required fields are complete?
Who updates the page when the answer sits elsewhere
Ticketing confirms ticket rules, security confirms stadium access, operations or communications confirms fixtures, and commercial confirms package details. The person who knows the answer is often not the person who edits the website.
Decide who provides the answer and who is responsible for updating the website. They may not be the same person.
Use the data you already have
Before buying another tool, the report suggests checking what Google Search Console and your site analytics already show: branded search trends, which pages appear in Google’s AI features, which social and video content is being discovered through Google, and where important supporter journeys break. Google’s generative-AI reporting provides visibility signals such as impressions and dimensions, rather than dedicated click, ranking or conversion metrics. Treat that visibility as one single signal rather than the outcome itself.
The key question is what happened for the supporter: did they find the correct answer, find something worth returning for or complete what they came to do?
Get the report
Your website's new job is a free 20-page guide for anyone responsible for content, digital or website performance at a football club. Written by First Team Consultancy in collaboration with Glide Publishing Platform, it includes a 90-day plan for one series, one page and one journey.
Download the football club website report →
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