A new report from Cloudways, part of DigitalOcean Holdings (NYSE: DOCN), finds that 80% of UK digital and ecommerce businesses believe AI-generated search experiences have reduced traffic to their websites over the past 12 months. The company calls the problem an AI visibility gap.
The research was run by Censuswide among 1,000 decision-makers, 500 in the UK and 500 in the US, between 24 and 29 June 2026. In the UK, 81% said technical website performance now matters more to online visibility than content alone, 77% said traditional SEO is no longer enough, and 78% expect poorly performing sites to be deprioritised by AI search and recommendation systems. Another 84% said speed, uptime and reliability have become a bigger priority over the past year.
Downtime figures are the respondents' own estimates rather than measured losses. The average UK digital business put the cost of website downtime during peak trading at £376,000 a year. Some 26% said they had already lost revenue to downtime in the past year, and 28% had customer problems at peak times, including failed transactions and slow checkouts.
Response is mostly reactive. One in five UK organisations (20%) said website problems are most often spotted through customer complaints, and 47% said fixing a server performance issue typically takes 30 to 59 minutes. On prevention, 38% review or test their infrastructure monthly, 29% weekly and just over one in ten (11%) monitor performance continuously with automation.
Suhaib Zaheer, SVP and General Manager of 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.”
He added that the next decade will be about optimising websites for AI, and that the businesses that succeed will not necessarily be those with the biggest marketing budgets but those whose sites are fast, resilient and ready to perform whenever customers, or AI, come looking.
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