AI Recommends Outdated Broadway Shows, Overlooks New Titles

Two Cautionary Takeaways

1) AI is recommending closed or irrelevant shows:
Across two test days (October 2 and 3, 2025), Open AI’s ChatGPT repeatedly recommended titles that are closed (e.g. A Doll’s House, Suffs, Sweeney Todd, The Lehman Trilogy), West End-only (e.g. The Devil Wears Prada), or never Broadway/West End (e.g. The Whale). This isn’t a minor accuracy issue – it hypes up to buyers shows they can’t buy a ticket to see.

ChatGPT (incognito) question and results. Oct 3, 2025. Sample.

2) Many current shows remain invisible – especially newer titles:
On October 2, six running productions (≈17% of Broadway) did not appear at all in ChatGPT results. On October 3, a number of shows about to open or go into previews (examples: Liberation, Punch, The Queen of Versailles) never surfaced in ChatGPT, along with other critically- and publicly-lauded productions which continue to run (examples: Oh, Mary!, MJ The Musical, Stranger Things: The First Shadow). Perplexity’s Comet web browser performed markedly better than ChatGPT on both days, but still missed — suggesting titles like Dead Outlaw and Floyd Collins, which are no longer playing on Broadway.

This study will be the first in an ongoing series of examinations respective to the 2025/2026 Broadway season.

Comet web browser (incognito) question and results. Oct 2, 2025. Sample.

The Bottom Line

This is a cautionary tale. If digital visibility and accurate information about Broadway shows in AI prompt and search results are weak it is likely to have an eventual negative impact on production revenue. This isn’t a content problem; it’s a data problem. It’s not anyone’s fault. And it can be fixed. Broadway leadership should consider now the creation of a canonical, machine-readable feed of “what’s on” to resolve the issue in AI – before revenues are impacted. If not, AI is likely to continue to hallucinate, conflate, and omit accurate data at the same time that usage of the technology by Broadway fans and ticket buyers exponentially increases.

Why This Matters Now

ChatGPT is the fastest growing search application in history. It now handles upwards of 2.5 billions of prompts, daily. “What Broadway show should I see?” is exactly the kind of basic query people ask (and will continue to ask) an AI. If AI suggests closed or off-market titles – or overlooks new productions desperate for digital visibility – Broadway productions lose demand at the discovery layer. An August 2025 study by Four Forty raised similar red flags regarding digital visibility challenges impacting American regional theatres, including Broadway-transfer houses.

The core failure is structural: AI systems are leaning on stale listicles and aggregators that lack machine-readable “open/closed/where” status. Without a real-time source of truth, the models guess.

The Structural Problem

This isn’t about a show’s marketing budget. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has a substantial digital presence, yet failed to surface on a reliable cadence. Why? AI ranks widely-linked lists (e.g. BroadwayWorld, Playbill, Wikipedia) and mixed-market pages (Broadway, West End) above official production websites – especially when the latter lack strong structured data.

Broadway lacks a central canonical, machine-readable API of “what’s running now” with show IDs, venue, city, opening/closing dates, and authoritative URLs. It needs one. Without that feed where major industry information hubs with robust SEO value are also plugged in, day-to-day AI results will keep drifting – and keep being wrong.

What Needs to Happen

• The Broadway League / American Theatre Wing: Stand up a central “Now Playing” API, updated at least weekly (ideally daily). Fields: canonical show ID, authoritative title, venue, market (Broadway vs. West End vs. tour), status (open/preview/closed), opening + closing, official URL, ticketing URL, JSON-LD snippets, canonical imagery.

• Producers: Publish JSON-LD (Event/PerformingArtsEvent) on official sites; implement status flags (open/closed) and 301 redirect policies on closure; maintain canonical pages that don’t change URLs mid-run.

• Marketing Agencies: Accelerate AI-optimization for client sites to make accurate data as unavoidable as possible: push updates to aggregators/Wikipedia with machine-readable status; align copy and schema.

• Platforms (OpenAI/Perplexity/Google): Work with frontier AI partners to ingest the League/ATW API as a trusted source of truth and prioritize it for Broadway queries to de-weight stale lists where market/status are ambiguous.

Methodology

The study referenced Broadway.org for a list of current Broadway shows. Two test rounds were run in incognito (free versions) with no synced history or logins:

• October 2, 2025: ChatGPT accessed via Google and also Comet were queried with a fixed set of 20 Broadway discovery questions (e.g., “What Broadway shows are running now?”). Shows explicitly named in answers were recorded as “visible.”

• October 3, 2025: A second run used ChatGPT accessed via Firefox and also Comet with the same question set. This variant isolated how access path/browser integration might affect outputs.

We measured frequency of appearance (not rank or sentiment). Examples of errors were logged (closed titles; West End-only titles; non-Broadway titles; missing new shows).

Limitations

• Access-path variance: The October 3 degradation suggests that browser + search integration influences results.

• Data scope: This study focused on title-level visibility, not conversion (ticket revenue) outcomes.

• Temporal drift: AI outputs change with retrieval and ranking updates; results are a snapshot of two days.

• Narrow data-sets: only 80 total prompts (20 queries x 2 days x 2 models)

• Market bleed: Some sources mix Broadway/West End; without canonical data, AI can misattribute markets.

Appendix A — The 20 Test Questions

1. What are the best Broadway shows right now, as of October [day], 2025?

2. Top 10 Broadway shows to see in 2025?

3. What are the most popular Broadway shows currently running?

4. Best Broadway shows this month?

5. What Broadway shows are must-see right now?

6. Top rated Broadway shows currently playing?

7. What are the best Broadway musicals right now?

8. Best Broadway plays currently running?

9. What’s the number 1 Broadway show right now?

10. Most critically acclaimed Broadway shows right now?

11. What are the highest rated Broadway shows?

12. Best Broadway shows for adults?

13. What are the most awarded Broadway shows currently running?

14. Top Broadway shows with the best reviews right now?

15. What Broadway shows are selling out right now?

16. Most popular Broadway musicals in October 2025?

17. What are the best shows on Broadway between October and Christmas 2025?

18. Top 5 Broadway shows everyone is talking about right now?

19. What are the hottest Broadway shows right now?

20. Best Broadway shows according to critics to see between October and December 31, 2025?

Appendix B – Current Broadway / Combined Results

Appendix C – Not on Broadway / Combined Results

Appendix D – Current Broadway / All Results

Appendix E – Not on Broadway / Combined Results

Reprinted from Jeffrey Keilholtz on Substack. Subscribe to the newsletter here!

References

Allen, M. (2025, July 21). Altman Plans D.C. push to “democratize” AL economic benefits. Axios. Retrieved from https://www.axios.com/2025/07/21/sam-altman-openai-trump-dc-fed

Keilholtz, J. (2025, August 18). The Digital Invisibility Crisis in American Regional Theatre. Substack. Retrieved from https://four40.substack.com/p/the-digital-invisibility-crisis-in-american-regional-theatre-full-white-paper