How to get Google to show your concerts
Event structured data explained for musicians: what Google reads from a date, what it needs to show it, and what stops it.
By Joan Subirats, founder of The Jazz Passport7 min read
In this article
Search Google for an artist who is on tour and you sometimes get a list of their upcoming concerts: date, venue, city and a link to tickets. Nobody typed that list. Google builds it from data that websites leave ready for it to read. If your site leaves no such data, your dates can sit on the page, perfectly clear to anyone reading, and the search engine will not see them.
What a person sees and what Google sees
"Friday 14th, Example Hall, 9 pm." A person reads that and has everything they need. A search engine reads the same text and has to guess. The 14th of which month, and which year? Which city is the hall in? Is this a concert, or a news item about one that has already happened?
Structured data removes the guessing. It is an invisible card inside the page that repeats the same information in a form a machine cannot misread. The vocabulary most sites use is called schema.org, and it has a type just for concerts: MusicEvent. The card is usually written in JSON-LD, a format of plain text arranged in fields.
What a date needs for Google to understand it
What each concert carries
- The name of the event: your name or the concert's
- The day and start time, with the year
- The name of the venue or place
- The address, with at least the city and the country
- Who is playing: you or your band
- The ticket link, if there is one
Google requires three of these: the name, the start date and the place with its address. The rest is recommended. The more complete the card, the easier it is for Google to show the event properly.
What it looks like inside
Here is the card for one concert. You never have to write it yourself. It is here so you can see what the search engine reads.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "MusicEvent",
"name": "Ana Example Trio live",
"startDate": "2026-11-14T21:00",
"eventStatus": "https://schema.org/EventScheduled",
"eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/OfflineEventAttendanceMode",
"location": {
"@type": "Place",
"name": "Example Hall",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "12 Example Street",
"addressLocality": "Manchester",
"addressCountry": "United Kingdom"
}
},
"performer": {
"@type": "MusicGroup",
"name": "Ana Example Trio",
"url": "https://anaexample.page.tjp.app"
},
"offers": {
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "https://tickets.example.com/ana-example-manchester",
"availability": "https://schema.org/InStock"
}
}
Read aloud, it says: a concert, scheduled and in person, on 14 November 2026 at nine in the evening, at Example Hall in Manchester, United Kingdom. Ana Example Trio is playing, and tickets are at that link. Each field has a plain meaning: location is the place, address its address, addressLocality the city, performer who plays and offers where to buy a ticket. When the concert is free or there are no advance sales, the card leaves offers out.
What stops your dates from showing
Usually the cause is simple. A piece of data is missing, or it sits somewhere the search engine cannot read it.
What Google can use
- Dates written as text on the page
- Every concert with its city and its venue
- Future dates, with year and time
- A direct link to the ticket sale for that date
What gets left out
- Dates that only exist on a poster image
- The tour in a PDF to download
- A concert with no city, or the city only in the title
- Concerts that have passed, still marked as upcoming
No city, no concert. An event result answers the question "where?". If the card does not name the city, the search engine does not know whom to show the concert to. This is the most common gap, and the easiest one to fix.
Past dates do not count. Google only shows events that have not happened yet. A concert still marked as upcoming after the night has passed helps neither the search engine nor the people reading your site.
An image is not data. The tour poster may be beautiful, but to a search engine it is a picture. A PDF is no better: Google may read it, though not as a list of events. The dates need to be on the page as text too.
The data has to match the page. If the card announces a concert the page does not show, or gives it a different date, the search engine may ignore it.
If it is cancelled, say so. Take a cancelled concert off the page, or mark it as cancelled. Left as scheduled, it sends people to a closed venue.
What is not up to you
How to check
- Open Google's Rich Results Test and paste the address of the page with your dates.
- See whether it detects events, and whether it flags any field as required or recommended.
- If your site is in Search Console, open the events report there: it lists the errors across all your pages.
- A few days after publishing a new date, search for your name. If the concert does not show, check its city and its date first.
Each concert's card is one piece of something larger: the data that tells Google and AI assistants who you are. That part is in your musician website and AI.
In Pages
In Pages you never write the card. You add your concerts in the Calendar, with the venue, address, city, time and, if there is one, the ticket link. When you publish the site, the upcoming dates appear on the page and also as MusicEvent data: the place with its address, you or your band as the performer, and the offer with the ticket link when there is one. Once a date has passed, it stops being published.
Health checks the published site and flags any upcoming date that has no city, with a link to the first one so you can fill it in.
If you are building your site from scratch, what a musician's website needs shows where the dates fit alongside everything else.
Your site, without the website work. Ask for your invitation.
Pages is the site and the Studio for musicians by The Jazz Passport. The technical side is done; you bring the music.