AI makes website performance a boardroom priority as digital businesses lose an estimated £336,000 a year to downtime
Business Wire•20/10/2026•08:07 ET
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Key Highlights
- ➤£336,000 average annual downtime cost estimated by surveyed digital businesses
- ➤80% say technical website performance now outweighs content for online visibility
- ➤77% believe traditional SEO alone no longer guarantees visibility
- ➤82% say AI recommendations are already changing how customers discover brands
- ➤24% report revenue losses from website downtime during the past year
Expert Statements
Suhaib Zaheer, SVP & General Manager, Managed Hosting at Cloudways by DigitalOcean
“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.”
Suhaib Zaheer, SVP & General Manager, Managed Hosting at Cloudways by DigitalOcean
“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.”
Suhaib Zaheer, SVP & General Manager, Managed Hosting at Cloudways by DigitalOcean
“Businesses spent the last two decades optimizing websites for search engines. The next decade will be about optimizing them for AI. The organizations 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.”
AI makes website performance a boardroom priority as digital businesses lose an estimated £336,000 a year to downtime
* The average digital business estimates it loses £336,000(1) every year to website downtime during peak trading, according to a new study from Cloudways.
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