artificial intelligence digital commerce
Business Wire
Published on : Dec 9, 2025
SeatGeek wants to make sure that when fans ask an AI assistant what to do this weekend, the answer includes its events—and, ideally, a ticket already in hand.
The high-growth ticketing platform announced it is a pilot partner in Google’s new agentic AI search experience, positioning SeatGeek among the first ticketing companies whose event inventory can be fully interpreted and acted upon by Google’s AI systems. The move signals a deeper shift in how discovery and conversion are converging as search evolves from typing queries into browsers to delegating tasks to intelligent agents.
For SeatGeek and its sports, concert, and venue partners, this isn’t just another search integration. It’s a bet on where fan journeys are headed next.
Google’s agentic AI experience represents a notable departure from traditional search. Instead of returning a list of links, the system is designed to understand intent, plan multi-step tasks, and act on users’ behalf—searching, comparing, and executing when prompted.
That’s a meaningful change for ticketing, an industry historically dependent on search rankings, paid listings, and comparison shopping. SeatGeek’s integration allows Google’s AI to ingest its structured event data and actively use it when answering broader queries such as “What should I do in Chicago this weekend?” or “Find me good courtside seats for a Knicks game.”
Today, the agentic ticketing experience is available to U.S. users opted into Google Labs, with broader access for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, and through Google’s AI Mode. As these experiences expand, they create a new discovery layer that sits above conventional SEO.
For SeatGeek, early participation helps ensure its events don’t get lost as interfaces shift.
SeatGeek says it has worked closely with Google to ensure its event listings and structured content can be easily read, interpreted, and acted on by agentic AI systems. This underscores a larger trend reshaping search strategy: success increasingly depends on how well machines—not humans—understand your data.
While structured data has long played a role in SEO, agentic systems raise the stakes. AI doesn’t just extract snippets; it evaluates inventory, pricing context, availability, and seat quality to decide what actions to recommend or execute.
For rightsholders—teams, venues, and artists—this represents a shift in leverage. Platforms that invest early in clean, rich data pipelines stand to gain disproportionate visibility as AI intermediates more of the buyer journey.
SeatGeek claims its efforts are already paying off.
Using Profound, a tool that tracks how brands surface across large language model outputs, the company has observed that SeatGeek appears in AI-generated search responses at a higher rate than other major ticketing platforms when prompted with similar event-related queries.
While the AI search landscape is still fluid—and competition from incumbents remains fierce—the signal is notable. As more discovery shifts into AI assistants and agentic search tools, visibility may hinge less on brand recall and more on how AI models assess data completeness and relevance.
For partners, this could mean that choosing a ticketing platform increasingly affects AI exposure, not just traditional traffic.
SeatGeek’s leadership is clear-eyed about the challenge.
“Fans no longer start their journey on just one channel,” said Russ D’Souza, co-founder of SeatGeek. “They’re asking questions across AI assistants, new search experiences, and tools that can plan or take actions for them.”
That fragmentation has been building for years, driven by mobile apps, voice assistants, and now generative AI. Agentic search accelerates the trend by collapsing discovery and transaction into a single interaction.
SeatGeek’s strategy is to make its inventory portable across these surfaces—whether fans are browsing Google Search, interacting with AI Mode, or engaging through future planning tools that haven’t yet fully emerged.
Agentic AI goes beyond answering questions. It can sequence actions: scanning inventory across platforms, comparing options, and acting when instructed.
SeatGeek’s participation in Google’s pilot offers several potential advantages to rightsholders:
Broader AI-driven discoverability: Events surface naturally when fans ask open-ended or planning-oriented questions.
Richer representation of inventory: AI models can better understand seating quality, availability, and pricing context from SeatGeek’s structured data.
New conversion paths: As fans adopt task-based search and AI assistants, bookings may happen without the traditional click-through funnel.
This represents a fundamental shift from optimizing for clicks to optimizing for actions—an adjustment ticketing companies will need to make quickly as AI-native interfaces gain adoption.
SeatGeek isn’t alone in preparing for this future, but it is early.
Across ecommerce and travel, companies are racing to ensure AI agents can transact against their inventories. Ticketing, with its time-sensitive products, fluctuating prices, and complex seating maps, is a particularly challenging—and potentially lucrative—use case.
By leaning into agentic search now, SeatGeek positions itself as a more AI-ready partner compared with rivals still optimized primarily for browser-based discovery. The competitive implications could be significant if agentic commerce gains mainstream traction.
The Google integration complements ongoing investments SeatGeek has been making across AI-driven discovery. These include user-generated content programs, richer inventory metadata, and experiments in multimodal search that blend text, visuals, and contextual signals.
Taken together, the strategy suggests SeatGeek is preparing for a future where discovery happens everywhere—across traditional search, social feeds, AI assistants, and planning tools that act autonomously.
“This is only the beginning,” said Suzy Evans, Senior Manager of Search at SeatGeek, pointing to a longer-term roadmap focused on AI search and distribution leadership.
Google’s agentic search features are rolling out gradually, and mass adoption is far from guaranteed. But if AI-driven planning and action become a routine part of how consumers discover experiences, early integration could offer compounding advantages.
SeatGeek’s enhanced AI discoverability is expected to expand through 2026 as Google introduces new agentic capabilities. For now, the pilot gives SeatGeek a front-row seat—and a say—in how ticketing evolves when search stops being just about answers and starts being about doing.
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