Squarespace, Wix, and most website builders block or limit AI crawlers by default. Here’s how to check if your venue site has this problem.
I want to tell you about a test I ran while preparing for a panel on AI and venue discovery. I tried to look up who was speaking at the conference using AI tools. The official speaker page returned nothing. Not partial information, not outdated information. Nothing!
I eventually found the speaker names in a press release from a third-party site. The conference’s own page, built on Squarespace, was effectively invisible to the AI tools I was using. The content was there visually; it just couldn’t be read by anything that wasn’t a human with a browser.
If their own conference page had this problem, I can promise you that a lot of venue websites do, too.
WHY THIS HAPPENS
Most modern website builders, including Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, and Weebly, rely heavily on JavaScript to display content. JavaScript is what makes websites look and behave like polished apps rather than plain documents. The problem is that most AI crawlers, including GPTBot (OpenAI’s crawler) and PerplexityBot, cannot execute JavaScript. They request your page and get back a shell; the actual content loads afterward, in the browser, where the crawler is no longer looking.
Squarespace adds a second layer to this problem. Its default security settings include a web application firewall that blocks non-standard crawlers. GPTBot and PerplexityBot are not on the allowed list. So even if those crawlers could execute JavaScript, Squarespace is actively turning them away at the door.
The result is that your beautifully designed venue website, with all your event listings and your history and your vibe written into every page, may be returning a blank response to the AI tools your potential fans are using to find you.
“The content was there visually. It just couldn’t be read by anything that wasn’t a human with a browser.”
THE 30-SECOND TEST YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW
You don’t need a developer to check this. Open your venue’s website in any browser, then right-click anywhere on the page and choose “View Page Source” (or press Ctrl+U on Windows, Cmd+Option+U on Mac). You’ll see a window full of code.
Don’t worry about understanding all of it. Just look for your venue’s name, your event titles, or any recognizable text from your homepage. If you can find it in the source code, a crawler can probably find it too. If the source code looks like a wall of script tags and configuration files with almost no readable text, that’s the problem. The content exists, but it loads after the page, in a way that crawlers can’t see.
What you’re looking for: actual readable text in the source, not just code. Your venue name, event names, descriptions, dates. If it’s not in the source, it’s not visible to most AI crawlers.
THE WIDGET PROBLEM DESERVES ITS OWN MENTION
Even venues whose main site is reasonably crawlable often have an invisible event calendar. If your shows are listed through a Ticketmaster or Eventbrite widget embedded on your page, those events load from a third-party server via JavaScript. The same crawlability problem applies: AI sees the widget placeholder, not the events inside it.
This is why a fan can ask ChatGPT “what’s happening at [your venue] this weekend” and get an answer that either mentions nothing or pulls from a third-party listing site instead of your own calendar. Your calendar is there; it’s just sealed off from the tools people are increasingly using to find things to do.
WHAT THE OPTIONS LOOK LIKE
The fix depends on what you’re working with, and I want to be honest that the range is wide.
- If you’re on Squarespace, there are partial workarounds like adding plain-text event information to pages alongside your widget, maintaining a static events page with crawlable content, and ensuring your Google Business Profile events are current (more on that in Post 5). Squarespace also has limited support for JSON-LD structured data through code injection, which helps with Google’s crawlers even if not all AI bots.
- If you’re on Wix, Webflow, or Weebly, the JavaScript rendering issue varies by how the site was built. Some Wix and Webflow sites render well for search engine crawlers specifically, because Google’s crawler does execute JavaScript; the gap is more pronounced for newer AI crawlers.
- If you’re on WordPress, you’re in the best position of the common platforms. WordPress serves static HTML by default, which means crawlers can read your content without executing JavaScript. Plugins like Yoast or RankMath handle structured data. It’s not perfect, but it’s a better starting point.
- If the test reveals your site is largely unreadable, it may be worth a conversation about a site rebuild. That’s not a small thing to recommend, and it’s not always the right answer; but for venues that rely on discovery searches for new customers, it’s a question worth asking directly.
The goal is straightforward: AI should be able to read your site the same way a human can. For a lot of venues right now, that gap is bigger than anyone realized.
Post 5 covers the next layer, which is what happened to your Google Business Profile in the last few months and why my team’s recent event searches came back looking very different than we expected.
JAM Agency helps independent venue operators show up where it matters — in search, in AI results, and in the minds of the people looking for exactly what you offer. Start a conversation at thejamagency.com.