AI adds extra pressure to UK retailers’ Black Friday website preparations

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 in the UK estimate the cost of website downtime during peak trading at an average of £376,000 a year¹.

Around four in five (81%¹) UK businesses now believe technical website performance plays a bigger role in online visibility than content alone, while 84% 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 in the UK increasingly believe customers are no longer discovering brands solely through traditional search.

More than eight in ten (83%¹) say AI-powered recommendations are already changing how customers find brands online, while 80% say they believe AI-generated search experiences have reduced traffic to their websites over the past 12 months. A further 78% believe websites with poor technical performance will increasingly be penalised or deprioritised by AI-driven search and recommendation systems.

Suhaib Zaheer, SVP and 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.’

Downtime is becoming a commercial risk, not just a technical problem

The growing importance of website performance is reflected in the financial impact of outages.

Just over one in four (26%) UK businesses say they have already lost revenue due to website downtime during the past year, while 28% experienced customer issues during peak traffic periods, including failed transactions and slow checkout journeys.

Meanwhile, businesses estimate that just one hour of downtime during peak trading could result in significant financial losses. Among overall respondents, this equates to an average cost of £47,000 for every hour a website is unavailable.

Resilience remains reactive for many businesses

While UK businesses recognise the challenge, many are still identifying problems after customers have already been affected.

One in five (20%) UK organisations say website issues are most commonly identified through customer complaints, while 47% say resolving server performance issues typically takes between 30 and 59 minutes.

At the same time, UK businesses are placing greater emphasis on website resilience. More than a third (38%) proactively review or test their website infrastructure every month, 29% do so every week and just over one in ten (11%) continuously monitor performance through automated systems.

Zaheer added: ‘Businesses spent the last two decades optimising websites for search engines. The next decade will be about optimising them for AI. The organisations that succeed won’t necessarily have the biggest marketing budgets. They’ll be the ones whose websites are fast, resilient and ready to perform whenever customers – or AI – come looking.’

To explore the findings in full and learn how businesses can prepare for an AI-driven internet, download the AI Visibility Gap Report at: Cloudways