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AI makes website performance a boardroom priority as digital businesses lose an estimated £336,000 a year to downtime

Business Wire

  • The average digital business estimates it loses £336,0001 every year to website downtime during peak trading, according to a new study from Cloudways.

  • Four in five (80%1) businesses believe technical website performance now plays a bigger role in online visibility than content alone.

  • More than three quarters (77%1) say traditional SEO is no longer enough as AI transforms how customers discover brands.

BROOMFIELD, Colo., October 20, 2026--A new 'AI Visibility Gap' is emerging as AI rewrites how customers discover brands online, according to a new report from Cloudways, part of DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: DOCN).

The inaugural From Search Rankings to AI Recommendations: The New Rules of Digital Visibility report reveals that, as AI search and discovery increasingly rely on website performance, digital businesses surveyed estimate the cost of website downtime during peak trading at an average of £336,000 a year1.

Four in five (80%1) businesses now believe technical website performance plays a bigger role in online visibility than content alone, while 81% say improving website speed, uptime and reliability has become a greater business priority during the past year. More than three quarters (77%1) believe traditional SEO tactics alone are no longer enough to guarantee visibility.

The AI visibility race has shifted from content to performance

Businesses increasingly believe customers are no longer discovering brands solely through traditional search.

More than eight in ten (82%1) say AI-powered recommendations are already changing how customers find brands online, while 76% say they believe AI-generated search experiences have reduced traffic to their websites over the past 12 months. A further 76% believe websites with poor technical performance will increasingly be penalized or deprioritized by AI-driven search and recommendation systems.

Suhaib Zaheer, SVP & General Manager, Managed Hosting at Cloudways by DigitalOcean, said: "The rules of online visibility are changing. For years, businesses competed by creating better content and improving SEO. Today, success increasingly depends on being discoverable, accessible, and reliable not just for people and search engines, but for AI agents.

"If your website is slow, unavailable or difficult for AI agents to access and navigate, you're no longer just risking a poor customer experience – you risk becoming invisible."

_______________________

1 Combining answer options "Strongly agree" and "Somewhat agree".

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