The Stale Listings Problem

When you read about an event online, have you ever called, just to make sure it’s actually happening? We have too.

What we found

Some websites label their events for search engines. One in four of those is telling them old news: 24.0% (95% range 22.2% to 25.9%) still list an event that ended over a month before we looked. That is about 2,101 of 8,746 sites, and 10.7% of all dated listings.

All that label events (1,607,742 read)24.0%

Busy sites (275,901 read)8.8%

24.0% of sites that label their events list one over by more than a month.

Old news keeps. The median stale listing was 322 days gone.

Over a year45.8%

Over two years29.9%

45.8% of stale listings were over a year old.

It keeps up appearances, too: 63.9% still said "scheduled."

Scheduled63.9%

No status35.0%

Cancelled or postponed0.7%

Only 0.7% admitted to being cancelled or postponed.

Most sites skip the labels entirely. Only about 1 in 180 uses them.

The kinder number

We re-read 275,901 sites busy posting events. Busy calendars are tidier: 8.8% (95% range 6.7% to 11.1%) of sites, 3.8% of listings, 136 days over at the median, 65.9% still "scheduled." We chose them for having current events, so the number flatters. Quote both.

Who keeps the oldest calendar

Venues: bars, restaurants, music, theater, museums, galleries, breweries. It is not a prize.

Venues (479)37.4%

Schools and colleges (71)23.8%

Clubs, charities, other groups (603)22.2%

City, county, parks, visitor bureaus (134)15.5%

Churches and places of worship (222)11.1%

37.4% of venue sites list a stale event.

How we counted

SuumerBot saved pages from 1,607,742 US venue and group websites between September 30, 2026 and October 21, 2026. It obeys robots.txt, logs in nowhere and climbs no walls. From 9,600 sites drawn at random, we checked each label's date against the moment we saved the page: 15,050 listings on 1,557 sites. The deeper read: 14,198 listings on 638 of 6,000 sites.

A listing is over only if it ended 30 days before we read it and more than a week before that month began, so a calendar still showing last month's final days gets a pass. Sports, repeating schedules and archives are left out. Dates are read in the earliest US time zone, so time zones never help us. Ranges come from 300 random redraws. Re-computed October 30, 2026.

What this does not show

We count the labels pages give machines, not what visitors see. We read 30 stale cases by hand:

Old event page, still online12

Only in the hidden label11

Under “past events”4

Shown as coming upabout 3

12 of 30 were old event pages still online.

It is one US-wide snapshot, not one city or every week. A stale "scheduled" means nobody updated it, not that anybody meant to mislead.

Why it matters

More people ask an AI "what's on tonight?" One that trusts these labels can send you to a night that already happened. Every Suumer listing shows the date we last checked it.

Free to quote; credit Suumer. Questions: [email protected].

See what's on, checked.