How an events business shows up in Google and in AI answers. Seven page types broken into the blocks they are built from, with a word budget and a job for each, the schema that is actually supported, and a master prompt per page. Plus the one question nobody answers: what do you do with an event page after the event is over.
Prepared by SwarmSystem. Every schema claim on this page was checked against Google Search Central and schema.org before it was written. Where the documentation says nothing, this page says so.
Most events SEO advice is inherited rather than checked. We checked. Five of the most repeated instructions do not survive contact with the primary documentation, and each one is costing somebody traffic right now.
"Mark a finished event as completed." There is no such value. Schema.org defines exactly five event statuses: scheduled, cancelled, postponed, rescheduled, and moved online. Nothing means finished, past, or completed.
This matters more than it sounds. It means there is no way, in event markup, to tell a search engine that an event is over. Which leads directly to the next three.
"Put event markup on your calendar page." Google does not support it. Its documentation is explicit that the event experience only supports pages focused on a single event, and it recommends marking up individual event pages rather than pages that list schedules or multiple events.
A calendar page carrying a list of events in its markup is doing work that produces nothing. That does not make the page worthless. It changes what the page is for, which we cover below.
"Noindex your past events." Google never said this. We looked for it. The only documented rule is a general one, that time sensitive content which is no longer relevant will not show as a rich result. There is no instruction to remove, hide, or noindex a past event anywhere in the guidance.
This one is expensive. Event businesses have been deleting their own proof for years on the strength of a rule nobody wrote. Your past events are the only evidence that the room is real, that people show up, and that speakers of that caliber come.
"A speaker page gets a rich result." Not documented. Schema.org gives you the right way to connect a person to the events they spoke at, and it is worth doing for clarity, but Google does not document a rich result for a person page. Anyone promising you one is guessing.
"Add FAQ markup and your questions show up in search." That result no longer exists. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in Search on 7 May 2026, and pulled the reporting for them out of Search Console before that.
Worth knowing because the advice is still everywhere and the feature is not. Keep writing the questions and answers. They are still the strongest material on the page for anything reading it to answer somebody. Just do not expect a search feature in return for the markup.
Here is the problem in plain terms. Someone asks an AI assistant for founder events in Austin. It finds your page from last March and answers as though it is happening. The person clicks through to register for something that already happened. You have lost them, and you look careless.
The obvious fix is to mark the event finished. You cannot, because that value does not exist. The second fix is to hide the page, which throws away the proof and breaks every link pointing at it.
So do neither. Change what the page is.
While it is upcoming, the page is an Event. It has a start time, a place, a way to register, and a reason to act now.
Once it is over, the same page at the same address becomes an article about that event. Not an Event any more. An Article, with an "about" pointer to the event it covers and the speakers listed as mentions.
Nothing moves. Nothing is hidden. Every link that pointed at that page still works. The photographs, the talks and the names all survive and stay findable. And an answer engine now cannot offer it as something to book, because it is no longer described as something bookable.
The rest of this page is what that means for each page on your site.
An events site is usually described as four pages: events, speakers, calendar, sponsors. That is one page short and three pages vague, because "the event page" is really three different things depending on where the event sits in its life.
| Page | What it is for | Markup that is actually supported |
|---|---|---|
| Series evergreen | The permanent home of a recurring gathering. The page that should rank for "founder meetup Austin". | EventSeries with an eventSchedule. Note: an event carrying a schedule must not also carry its own start and end dates. |
| Occurrence upcoming | One dated instance. This is the only page where a rich result actually lives. | Event. Required: name, start date, and a location with a real address. Then description, end date, status, attendance mode, image, offers, organizer, performer, sponsor. |
| Recap the same page, after | Proof it happened and was worth attending. The only page that gets more valuable with age. | Article or BlogPosting, about the event, mentioning the speakers. Not Event. |
| Speakers hub | The roster. Who has stood in front of this room. | CollectionPage and breadcrumbs. No event markup. |
| Speaker detail | One speaker's authority page. Ranks for their name plus the topic. | Person, with links to their real profiles, and performerIn pointing at the events they spoke at. |
| Calendar | Browse what is coming and what has been. | CollectionPage and breadcrumbs. No event markup, by Google's own instruction. |
| Sponsors | Who backs this, and the value they bought. | CollectionPage, each sponsor an Organization. The sponsor link sits on the occurrence page. |
If you run the same thing every month, do you get one page or twelve? The two sources disagree, and most advice hides that.
Schema.org models a series with a schedule: repeats monthly, third Thursday, skipping December. Google says its event experience only supports single event pages, and does not document whether it reads schedules at all.
So do both, deliberately. Keep one evergreen series page carrying the schedule, and give each occurrence its own dated page pointing back to the series as its parent. The occurrence pages are where the rich result can appear. The series page is what an answer engine reads to understand that this is a standing thing rather than a one off.
Markup tells a machine what a thing is. It does not tell a person whether to come. Thin pages with perfect schema win nothing, and this is the half most technical guides skip.
Everything below answers one of four questions. These are the questions a real person asks before giving up an evening, and they are the same four an AI assistant is answering on their behalf. Answer them in plain sentences, near the top, and you have done the work.
In order: is this for me, what actually happens in the room, who will be there, and what it costs me in money and time.
Is this for me is where most people leave. Answer it in one sentence, in their language, not in category language.
What happens means the experience, not the agenda. Two hours, who talks, what the room does.
Who is there matters because people come for people. Describe the room by type if names are private.
What it costs is money and time both. State the door time and the end time.
Series page. Name the room and the person it is for. Say who should not come. State the cadence and the place as plain facts. Show the last few recaps so it is obvious this actually runs.
Occurrence, upcoming. What this session covers and why now. Who is speaking and the one thing they know that the room does not. Date, time, door, place, cost, findable in three seconds. What to expect if it is your first time, which converts more first timers than anything else on the page.
Recap. What was said, in enough detail to be worth reading if you were not there. The best line anyone said, quoted. Who was in the room. Photographs of people, not of the venue. What happened afterwards.
Speaker detail. Who they are in one sentence a stranger understands. What they actually know, with evidence. What they said here and when. Where else to find them.
Sponsors. What the sponsor does, in their customer's language, not in yours. Which sessions they backed. A real link out.
Calendar and speakers hub. These are navigation. One line of orientation and honest labels. Do not pad them.
1. Stop deleting your past events. Covered above. This is the single most valuable correction on this page, and it costs nothing to stop doing.
2. Switch the type instead of hiding the page. Event while it is upcoming, article about the event once it is over, same address throughout.
3. Give every speaker their own page. A speaker's name plus their topic is a real search with real volume and almost nothing competing for it. Their own site often does not target it.
4. Then ask the speaker to link to it. This is the highest yield ask in the whole system. Speakers want proof they spoke. Give them a page worth linking to and ask them to link it from their site or their profile. It is the thing they already wanted, it costs you nothing, and it compounds with every session you run.
5. Sponsors link back too, for the same reason and with a commercial motive attached. A sponsor who can be found is a sponsor who renews.
6. Say which months you skip. If the series takes December off, put that in the schedule. Precision is cheap and almost nobody bothers, and correctness in the small things is what makes the rest of the entity trustworthy.
7. Treat the calendar as plumbing, not as a showpiece. Once the event markup comes off it, it becomes the densest set of internal links on the site, tying every occurrence and recap into one place a crawler can walk.
8. Close the loop. The recap links to whatever you wrote afterwards, and that writing links back to the recap and to the series page. One event generates a small cluster all pointing at the page that has to rank.
9. Publish an llms.txt describing the series, its cadence and its canonical addresses. This is forward looking, not a documented ranking factor, and it is listed here as exactly that.
Google publishes no word count threshold. There is no length that makes a page rank and no length that stops it. Anyone who quotes you a number as a ranking factor is repeating a rumour.
So the ranges below are not thresholds. They are budgets. They are what it takes to answer the four questions properly on that particular page and then stop. A page under the range is usually missing an answer. A page over it is usually padded, and padding is the thing that makes a room sound like every other room.
Images are counted the same way. An image earns its place by showing something a sentence cannot: the room full, the person talking, the whiteboard. Stock photography of a generic conference hall is worse than no image, because it tells a visitor you have never photographed your own event.
| Page | Words | Images | What makes it longer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series evergreen | 500 to 900 | 4 to 8 | How many past recaps you show, and whether the first timer questions live here or on the occurrence page. |
| Occurrence upcoming | 350 to 700 | 3 to 6 | How much the speaker needs introducing. A known name needs two lines. An unknown one needs a paragraph and proof. |
| Recap same page, after | 700 to 1,400 | 8 to 20 | The number of talks and how much of the questions from the floor you write up. This is the only page where more is usually better. |
| Speaker detail | 300 to 600 | 2 to 4 | How much evidence exists. Do not stretch a thin bio. Publish what is true and add to it after they speak again. |
| Speakers hub | 120 to 250 | 1 per speaker | Nothing. This page grows by gaining rows, not by gaining prose. |
| Calendar | 100 to 200 | 0 to 1 | Nothing. If your calendar page is getting wordy, the words belong on a page that can rank. |
| Sponsors | 250 to 500 | 1 per sponsor | How many sponsors, plus the block explaining how to become one. |
Word counts exclude navigation, footer and markup. Image counts are real photographs you own, not icons.
Each page below is a stack of blocks in a fixed order, with a word budget for each. Under every block are two lines. Search is what that block does for someone typing into Google. AI answer is what it does when an assistant is reading the page to answer a question on somebody's behalf.
They are not the same job, and that is the whole point of separating them. Search rewards a page that covers a topic. An answer engine is looking for a sentence it can lift and be right about. Those two goals pull the writing in different directions, and a block that serves one and not the other is where most events pages leak.
20 to 40
SearchCarries the phrase a stranger actually types, which is the thing plus the city, not your brand name.
AI answerThis is the sentence a model repeats when somebody asks what this is. It has to make sense with no page around it.
60 to 120
SearchPicks up the long tail of role and stage language, which is where the low competition searches live.
AI answerThe "not for" line is what lets an assistant rule you out correctly instead of guessing and sending the wrong person.
80 to 150
SearchCovers the "what is it like" and "what should I expect" phrasings that nobody writes a page for.
AI answerGives a model the shape of the evening, so it describes your event instead of inventing a generic agenda.
40 to 80
SearchThese are the entity facts. They have to match your markup exactly, word for word and number for number.
AI answerRead first and repeated most. If the page and the markup disagree, this is the thing that gets said wrong out loud.
60 to 120
SearchThe densest internal linking on the site, and the proof to a crawler that this page sits on top of a real cluster.
AI answerRecency evidence. Three dated recaps read as a live series. Zero reads as abandoned, and abandoned things do not get recommended.
80 to 150
SearchMatches question phrasing directly, and question phrasing is what people type when they are close to showing up.
AI answerAnswers more assistant questions per word than anything else on the page. Parking, dress, arriving alone, whether anyone will talk to you.
25 to 50
SearchThe only link on this page that has to be obvious. Everything above it exists to get somebody here.
AI answerGives the assistant something concrete to hand over instead of "check their website for details".
The occurrence page and the recap page are one page at one address. It is written twice. Here is the first version, then the second.
12 to 25
SearchMonth and year in the title is what makes this page distinct from the eleven others like it.
AI answerStops an assistant confusing this instance with the series or with last year's.
25 to 45
SearchThe topical hook. It is the only part of this page that is not true of every other date.
AI answerThe reason a model gives when somebody asks whether this one is worth going to.
40 to 70
SearchEvery one of these appears in the markup too. A mismatch between the two is the most common cause of a wrong time showing in a result.
AI answerAssistants get asked "what time does it start" more than anything else. Put the door time and the start time separately, because they are different questions.
80 to 160
SearchTheir name plus your city is a real search with almost nothing competing for it. Link to their own page on your site.
AI answerTurns "who is speaking" from a name into a reason. A name alone is not an answer anybody acts on.
60 to 110
SearchOutcome language, which is how people search when they are deciding rather than browsing.
AI answerThe block that decides whether an assistant recommends this to the person asking or mentions it in passing.
40 to 70
SearchThree lines and a link back to the series page, which is where the full version lives. Do not duplicate it.
AI answerRemoves the last reason somebody talks themselves out of coming, which is not knowing what walking in looks like.
15 to 30
SearchOne link, one label, the same URL that is in the offers block of your markup.
AI answerIf the price is free, write the word free. Assistants report a missing price as unknown, and unknown reads as expensive.
Same address. The type changes from Event to Article. The registration block comes off. Everything else is rewritten in the past tense and then it grows.
10 to 20
SearchKeep the date. The date is what makes this page findable years later when somebody searches the speaker's name.
AI answerPast tense is the single clearest signal that this is not something to book. Say "spoke", not "speaks".
250 to 600
SearchThe substance. This is the only block on your site that competes on the topic rather than on the event, and it is where the durable traffic comes from.
AI answerSpecifics get cited. A number, a named tool, a real dollar figure from the room. Summary language gets skipped.
25 to 60
SearchA quote with a name attached is the most linkable object on the page. It is what somebody screenshots.
AI answerQuotes travel. A model repeating one sentence from your event with a name attached is the cheapest mention you will ever earn.
60 to 120
SearchDescribe the room by type and count. If names are private, say the types and the number and leave it there.
AI answerAnswers "what kind of people go" without you having to publish a guest list.
150 to 350
SearchReal questions in the words people used. This block is the reason to keep a recording, and it is covered on its own below.
AI answerThe highest value block on the whole site for an answer engine, because it is a question and its answer sitting next to each other in a stranger's own phrasing.
40 to 100
SearchCaption with names and the date. A photograph nobody has described is invisible to everything except a human eye.
AI answerAlt text is read. Write it as a sentence about who is in the picture and what they were doing, not as a keyword.
30 to 60
SearchThe link to the next date and back to the series. This is how a recap keeps sending people forward for years.
AI answerStops a dead end. Somebody arriving here from a search two years late still gets pointed at something live.
20 to 40
SearchTheir name is the primary phrase. Their job title is the secondary one. Both belong in the first sentence.
AI answerThis is the line an assistant reads back when asked who somebody is. Write it so it is true away from your site.
100 to 200
SearchTheir name plus a topic is a search nobody is competing for, including them. This block is how you win it.
AI answerEvidence separates a real profile from a directory listing. Numbers, companies, dates, outcomes.
60 to 140
SearchTwo way linking between this page and every recap they appear in. This is the connective tissue of the whole site.
AI answerConnects a person to events. Without it, a model sees a bio page and an event page and has no reason to think they are related.
20 to 50
SearchReal outbound links to their real profiles. This is what tells a search engine which person of that name this is.
AI answerDisambiguation. There are four people with that name and only one of them spoke at your event.
15 to 30
SearchSay what the list is and how far back it goes. That is the whole job.
AI answerEstablishes that a roster exists and how long it is, which is a credibility fact on its own.
6 to 14 per speaker
SearchName, one line, the date they spoke, linked. Nothing else. This is a routing page and it should read like one.
AI answerThe date next to each name is what turns a list of strangers into a history.
If this page is getting long in prose rather than in rows, the prose belongs on a speaker page.
15 to 30
SearchThis page is not trying to rank. Its job is to be walked by a crawler.
AI answerOne honest line about what is on the list and how far back it goes.
list only
SearchEach row links to an occurrence page. Never to a popup, never to a modal, never to a script that builds the link after load.
AI answerDates and links. A calendar rendered entirely in JavaScript is a blank page to most things reading it.
list only
SearchThis half is the reason the page exists. It is the densest set of internal links on the site and it points at every recap you own.
AI answerThe length of the past list is the clearest possible evidence that this thing actually runs.
25 to 50
SearchSponsorship language plus your city and your audience type. A small search, and a commercial one.
AI answerAnswers the question a potential sponsor is really asking, which is who is in the room.
40 to 90 each
SearchDescribe what they do the way their own buyer would say it, not the way their marketing department says it. Link out for real.
AI answerName which sessions they backed. A sponsor attached to a dated event is a fact. A logo is not.
40 to 80
SearchOne clear route to a conversation. This page has a commercial job and it should do it.
AI answerState the room size and the audience type as plain numbers, because that is what gets quoted back.
Internal links are how a crawler learns that these pages are one thing rather than nine separate documents. Laid out as a board, the pattern is obvious: everything routes through the occurrence page, and only two wires leave the board at all.
Those two are the ones worth chasing. A speaker linking to their own page on your site, and a sponsor doing the same, are the only links here you do not control. They are also the only ones that bring authority in rather than move it around.
The board makes two things visible that a list of rules hides. The occurrence page is the hub, so a broken link there costs more than a broken link anywhere else. And the calendar, which carries no markup and ranks for nothing, is still load bearing, because it is the only page that touches every occurrence you have ever run.
| Page | Links out to | Should be linked from |
|---|---|---|
| Series | The next occurrence. The last three recaps. The speakers hub. The sponsors page. | Home, the main navigation, every occurrence, every recap. |
| Occurrence upcoming | The series page as its parent. Each speaker on it. Each sponsor on it. The previous recap. | The series page, the calendar, home if it is the next date. |
| Recap same page, after | Everything the occurrence linked to, plus the next occurrence, plus anything you published afterwards. | The series page, the calendar, every speaker who appeared, anything you wrote about it. |
| Speaker detail | Every occurrence and recap they appear on. The speakers hub. Their own real profiles. | The speakers hub, every event they spoke at, and their own site once you ask. |
| Speakers hub | Every speaker page. The series page. | The main navigation, the series page. |
| Calendar | Every occurrence and every recap you have. The series page. | The main navigation, the series page, the footer. |
| Sponsors | Each sponsor's real site. The occurrences they backed. | Every occurrence carrying a sponsor, the footer, and the sponsor's own site once you ask. |
Two rules that are easy to get wrong. Link with words that describe the destination, not with the word here. And build the link in the HTML, because a link a script writes after the page loads is a link that some readers never see. The full discipline is at internal-linking.swarmsystem.ai and is not repeated here.
You already own the material for the strongest page you will publish this month. It is in a recording nobody has opened since the night it was made.
Record every session, even badly. A phone at the back of the room is enough. You are not making a film. You are making a transcript, and a transcript is the only written record of how your audience talks about their own problem.
Never publish the transcript. Spoken language read cold is close to unreadable, and a wall of it is exactly the thin page that helps nothing. The transcript is raw material. Six things come out of it, and each one has a home.
| Pull this out | It goes here | Why it is worth the trouble |
|---|---|---|
| The sentence that made the room go quiet | Recap, block 03 | The most quotable object you will produce all month. It is what somebody screenshots and what a model repeats with a name attached. |
| Every question asked from the floor | Recap, block 05 | Real questions in real phrasing. You did not have to guess at what people search for. They said it out loud in the room. |
| The words people use for their own problem | Series, block 02 | Your category language and their language are not the same. The transcript is the only place theirs is written down. |
| Specifics: numbers, tools, companies, dollar figures | Recap, block 02 | Specifics get cited. Summaries get skipped. This is the difference between a page that gets quoted and one that gets ignored. |
| Objections and disagreements | Recap block 02, and the next occurrence page | An event where somebody pushed back reads as a real room. One where everybody agreed reads as a webinar. |
| What people said they would do next | Recap block 07, and "what you leave with" on the next date | The outcome in an attendee's words instead of yours. It is the only version of that claim anybody believes. |
An assistant answering somebody's question is looking for two things sitting next to each other: a question in ordinary phrasing, and a plain answer directly under it. A room full of people handed you exactly that, out loud, for free.
Write each question as a heading, in the words the person actually used, including the awkward ones. Answer it underneath in plain sentences. Do not tidy the question into marketing language, because the untidy version is the version people type.
One thing to be clear about. Do not add FAQ markup expecting a rich result. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in Search on 7 May 2026, and the reporting for them came out of Search Console before that. The rich result is gone. The content is not: questions and answers in real phrasing are still the strongest material on the page for anything reading it to answer somebody. Write the block. Skip the markup, or leave it and expect nothing from Google for it.
Before you publish somebody by name, ask them. It costs one message, and it is the same message where you ask them to link to their speaker page from their own site.
Send it while they still feel good about the night, not three weeks later. You are giving them proof they spoke and a page worth pointing at. Almost nobody says no to that, and almost nobody remembers to ask.
If a room is private or people spoke on the understanding it stays in the room, say the type and the number instead of the names. "Fourteen owners, most of them between two and ten trucks" is a real answer and gives nothing away.
Do not paste the whole thing into a model and ask for a blog post. What comes back is a summary of a summary, written in nobody's voice, with every specific sanded off. It will read fine and be worth nothing, because the parts that made the night worth attending are exactly the parts a summarizer drops.
Give it the six extracts and the block order instead. That is what the prompts below do: pull the extracts first as a separate step, check them against the recording, then write from the extracts and never from the raw file.
Everything above is a standard. Below is the same standard written as prompts, so it runs the same way whoever is at the keyboard.
Paste the standing brief once. Then paste one page prompt under it. Two things make this a system rather than a pile of prompts: every prompt refuses rather than invents, and every prompt has to print what each block is doing for search and for an AI assistant before it writes the block. If a page comes back without those lines, the thinking was skipped and the words are decoration.
Paste this first, every time, and fill in the facts. A blank line is a question, not a gap to write around.
STANDING BRIEF. Paste this once, then paste one page prompt under it.
You are writing one page of an events website. This is not marketing copy.
It is the page somebody reads while deciding whether to give up an evening.
THE FACTS. Fill these in. If a line is blank, ask me for it and stop.
What the gathering is : [ONE LINE]
City : [CITY]
Who it is for : [IN THEIR WORDS, NOT YOUR CATEGORY LANGUAGE]
Who it is NOT for : [BE SPECIFIC. THIS LINE IS NOT OPTIONAL]
Venue name and address : [FULL STREET ADDRESS]
Cadence or date : [E.G. THIRD THURSDAY MONTHLY, OR ONE DATE]
Door, start, end times : [THREE SEPARATE TIMES]
Price : [A NUMBER, OR THE WORD FREE]
Register at : [URL]
Source material : [TRANSCRIPT EXTRACTS, NOTES, PAST COPY]
ANSWER FOUR QUESTIONS ON EVERY PAGE, near the top, in this order:
1. Is this for me
2. What actually happens
3. Who is there
4. What it costs, in money and in time
HOW TO WRITE
Fifth grade reading level. Short sentences. One idea per sentence.
Plain words. Say "the room", not "the community". Say "free", not "no cost".
No em dashes. No exclamation marks. No semicolons.
Banned words: elevate, unleash, seamless, leverage, curated, immersive,
transformative, journey, ecosystem, unlock, empower, thrilled, excited.
No opener about a fast paced world, a new era, or the age of anything.
No rule of three unless there are genuinely three things.
THE HARD RULE
Never invent a fact. If a number, name, date, price, quote or claim is not
in THE FACTS above or in the source material, stop and ask me for it by
name. Do not estimate. Do not write "approximately". Do not drop in a
placeholder and keep going.
OUTPUT
One heading per block, in the block order I give you, nothing extra.
Print the word count in brackets after each block.
At the end, list every fact you used and where it came from.
Then list what you had to leave out because I did not give it to you.Run this before any recap gets written. Check the results against the recording yourself, then write from the extracts and never from the raw file.
TASK: pull extracts from a recording. Do not write a page yet.
INPUT: the transcript of [EVENT NAME] on [DATE], pasted below.
Return exactly six lists. Quote the transcript directly. Do not paraphrase,
do not tidy the grammar, and do not merge two speakers into one line.
1. QUOTES. The three or four lines with the most weight. Give me the
speaker name and the timestamp for each so I can check them.
2. QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR. Every question anybody asked, in the words
they used, including the ones that came out badly. Do not rewrite them.
3. THEIR LANGUAGE. Words and phrases the audience used for their own
problem. Note where these differ from how the speaker described it.
4. SPECIFICS. Every number, tool name, company name, price and date said
out loud, and who said it.
5. PUSHBACK. Anywhere somebody disagreed, hedged, or raised a problem.
6. NEXT ACTIONS. Anything anybody said they were going to go and do.
If a list is empty, say it is empty. Do not fill it to be helpful.
Mark anything you could not hear clearly as UNCLEAR. Do not guess at it.PAGE: the series page, the evergreen home of a recurring event.
URL SHAPE: /events/[series-slug]/
TARGET: 500 to 900 words. 4 to 8 real photographs.
BLOCKS, in this order, with word budgets:
1. The name, and one line under it 20 to 40
2. Who this room is for, and who it is not for 60 to 120
3. What actually happens, in order 80 to 150
4. The standing facts: cadence, place, time, price 40 to 80
5. The last three recaps, dated and linked 60 to 120
6. First time here 80 to 150
7. The next date, and one way to act 25 to 50
BEFORE each block, print one line saying what it is doing for search and one
line saying what it is doing for an AI assistant reading the page. Then write.
STOP RULES
If I have not given you at least two past dates, say so and stop.
Block 4 has to match the schedule in the markup word for word. If you do
not have the markup, write the facts and flag that they need checking.
No specific date anywhere on this page except in blocks 5 and 7.PAGE: one dated occurrence, before it happens.
URL SHAPE: /events/[series-slug]/[yyyy-mm]/
TARGET: 350 to 700 words. 3 to 6 photographs.
BLOCKS:
1. Title carrying the date and the topic 12 to 25
2. Why this session, and why now 25 to 45
3. The facts: date, door, start, end, address, price 40 to 70
4. The speaker, and the one thing they know 80 to 160
5. What you leave with 60 to 110
6. First time here, short, linking to the series 40 to 70
7. Register 15 to 30
Print the search line and the AI assistant line before each block.
STOP RULES
Block 3 needs a real street address. A venue name on its own is not enough.
If the speaker is not a name my audience already knows, block 4 needs
evidence rather than adjectives. Ask me for it instead of writing around it.
If the price is zero, write the word free. Never leave price out.
Do not copy block 6 from the series page. Three lines and a link.PAGE: the same URL as the occurrence, rewritten after the event.
DO NOT CREATE A NEW PAGE. This replaces the body at the same address.
TARGET: 700 to 1,400 words. 8 to 20 photographs of people.
INPUT: the six extract lists from the extraction prompt. If I have not given
you those, ask for them. Do not work from a raw transcript.
BLOCKS:
1. The headline, past tense, keeping the date 10 to 20
2. What was said, the part worth reading 250 to 600
3. The best line, quoted and attributed 25 to 60
4. Who was in the room 60 to 120
5. The questions from the floor, answered 150 to 350
6. Photograph captions, with names and the date 40 to 100
7. What happens next, linked 30 to 60
Print the search line and the AI assistant line before each block.
STOP RULES
Block 3 has to be a real quote from the extracts. If I have not confirmed
permission to use the speaker's name, ask me before you write it.
Block 5 uses the questions in the words people used. Do not tidy them.
Remove the registration block. The event has happened.
Every verb is past tense. Check each one before you hand it back.PAGE: one speaker.
URL SHAPE: /speakers/[speaker-slug]/
TARGET: 300 to 600 words. 2 to 4 photographs.
BLOCKS:
1. Name, and one sentence a stranger understands 20 to 40
2. What they actually know, with evidence 100 to 200
3. What they said here, by date, linked 60 to 140
4. Where else to find them 20 to 50
Print the search line and the AI assistant line before each block.
STOP RULES
Block 2 is evidence, not praise. Numbers, companies, dates, outcomes.
If I have not given you evidence, ask for it. Never write "widely respected".
Block 1 has to still be true read on its own with no page around it.
Do not stretch a thin bio to reach the word count. A short true page beats a
padded one. Say the page is short and tell me what would fill it.PAGE: the speakers hub.
URL SHAPE: /speakers/
TARGET: 120 to 250 words. One photograph per speaker.
BLOCKS:
1. One line saying what the list is and how far back it goes 15 to 30
2. The roster: name, one line, the date they spoke, linked 6 to 14 each
STOP RULES
This is a routing page. Do not give it a personality.
If you find yourself writing a third block, those words belong on a speaker
page. Tell me which one and stop.PAGE: the calendar.
URL SHAPE: /calendar/
TARGET: 100 to 200 words. The page is mostly a list.
BLOCKS:
1. One line saying what the list is and how far back it goes 15 to 30
2. Upcoming, by date, each row linking to its occurrence page
3. Past, by date, going back as far as I have, each row linked
STOP RULES
Every row is a real link in the HTML. If the list is built by a script after
the page loads, say so and stop. That is a build problem and no copy fixes it.
Do not write event markup for this page. Google does not support it here.
Do not drop past dates. The past list is the reason the page exists.PAGE: sponsors.
URL SHAPE: /sponsors/
TARGET: 250 to 500 words. One logo or photograph per sponsor.
BLOCKS:
1. What backing this actually buys 25 to 50
2. Each sponsor, in their customer's language 40 to 90 each
3. How to become one 40 to 80
Print the search line and the AI assistant line before each block.
STOP RULES
Block 2 says what the sponsor does the way their own buyer would say it.
If all I gave you is their tagline, ask me what they actually sell.
Name the sessions each sponsor backed, with dates. A logo with no date
attached to it is decoration.
Blocks 1 and 3 need the real room size and audience type. Ask if missing.These prompts assume the URL shape used throughout this playbook. If yours differs, change it in every prompt at once, because the links between the pages are wired to it.
A monthly founder meetup, a destination conference and a venue that rents itself out are three different businesses. Most of this playbook holds. These are the parts that change.
There is no series, so the evergreen page is the conference brand itself and it carries the year. Sessions inside the conference are the sub events, and the conference is their parent.
Speakers matter far more here, because people buy tickets for the lineup. The speaker pages are a revenue asset, not a nicety.
The recap switch matters most of all: last year's page is what sells this year's ticket, so it must survive and stay findable. If tickets differ by day, each day needs its own page and its own markup.
This one inverts. You are not the host, so the event pages largely go away. What you are selling is a place and a service, so the primary pages are service and location pages rather than event pages, and the schema follows that.
The speaker page has no equivalent and should not be forced. What replaces it is the real work: past events you hosted, photographed, credited, and described. That is your speaker roster.
Sponsors become partners and preferred vendors, and the reciprocal link logic is identical and just as valuable.
The one thing that carries over unchanged is the recap. A venue's past events are its portfolio, and hiding them is the same mistake in a different costume.
Rather than describe a hypothetical, here is a live events site measured before any of this was applied. The numbers below are counted by a script at build time, not typed by hand.
Of 13 pages, 12 carry no structured data. The site has 289 internal links across 13 destinations and 0 orphan pages.
The interesting part is what this is not. This site is well linked. 289 internal links, 0 orphan pages, every page reachable. Somebody built the navigation properly.
It is the structured data that is missing: 12 of 13 pages describe themselves to a machine not at all. No event is marked as an event. No speaker is connected to the thing they spoke at. To a search engine or an assistant, this is a set of documents rather than a gathering with a history, a roster and a schedule.
That is the common case. Events businesses tend to have decent navigation and no machine readable identity at all.
This page does not tell you that these changes produced a percentage lift in traffic, registrations, or AI mentions.
It could have. The number would not have been trustworthy. A single free monthly event does not generate enough volume to separate the effect of structured data from a founder's post going out the same week, and "AI mentions" move for reasons nobody controls, including model training cycles.
What is claimed is what can be checked: the markup is supported and correct, the pages describe themselves accurately, and the proof is preserved rather than deleted. If somebody shows you an events SEO case study with a clean attribution story on a small event, ask how they ruled out the founder's LinkedIn.
The companion to this page is a set of fillable pages, one per page type, with the markup already written and the links between them already wired. Fill in the blanks and you have a page set that validates.
Related: the internal linking discipline at internal-linking.swarmsystem.ai, plus the service page and hub and spoke playbooks for the parts of a site that are not events.