How do I get my gigs to show up on Google and Bandsintown?

Google and Bandsintown don't watch your Instagram. They pull dates from specific places that are built to be read by machines: your own website's event markup, Bandsintown's own database, Songkick, and the venue's listing. If a gig only exists as a flyer image in a story, none of those four places can see it, and it will never surface in a search or an app.

The four places dates come from

Your own site. If your website has a page for tour dates written in a format called structured data (schema.org Event, usually as JSON-LD in the page code), Google can read the date, venue, city, and ticket link directly and sometimes show it in search results. This is the only source that is fully in your control.

Bandsintown. This is its own database. It does not scan the internet for your gigs — you or your team have to add them, either by hand in the Bandsintown dashboard, by connecting a service that feeds it (like Songkick), or through a calendar sync. Fans who follow you there only see what's been entered.

Songkick. Same idea: it's a database you populate, not a search engine that finds you. Some artists link Songkick and Bandsintown so a date entered in one appears in the other, but that link has to be set up — it's not automatic just because you have accounts on both.

The venue's own listing. This one you don't control directly. If the venue posts your date on their site with proper markup, or in their own listings page, that's a separate signal Google can pick up, and it often ranks well for local searches like "live music this weekend." You influence it by sending the venue clean, correct details early and asking them to post it.

What each one needs, and how long it takes

Bandsintown and Songkick both need the basics: date, venue name, city, ticket link if there is one. Entering a date usually shows up for your followers within a day. Getting picked up more broadly — in-app discovery, cross-posting to other services — can take longer and isn't something you can rush.

Structured data on your own site is different. Once it's live and correct, Google still has to crawl your site again before it notices the change. That can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks depending on how often your site gets crawled. Adding a new page and hoping it appears tomorrow is the wrong expectation to have.

Venue listings depend entirely on the venue's own process. Some update same-day. Some update never unless you follow up.

The recurring failure: the Instagram-only date

The single most common way a gig disappears is this: the date is announced in an Instagram story, the story expires in 24 hours, and it was never typed as plain text anywhere permanent. A poster image, however nice, is not text. Google can't read the date off a JPEG. Bandsintown doesn't scan your Instagram grid. Nothing indexes a picture as an event.

The fix isn't complicated: every gig needs to exist as actual text, in a system built to hold it, before or alongside the pretty announcement. Post the graphic if you want, but also put the date on your website's tour page and in Bandsintown. The graphic gets people excited in the moment. The text is what makes the gig findable a week later when someone searches your name plus their city.

The order to do it in

1. Add the date to your own website first, since it's the one source fully under your control and the one most likely to compound over time in search.
2. Add it to Bandsintown, since that's where a lot of fans actually check for tour dates directly.
3. Add it to Songkick if you still use it, and link the two services if you haven't already.
4. Send the venue the exact date, city, and ticket link in writing and ask them to post it. Do this early — venues are slower to update than you are.

Do all four for every gig, even the small ones. It's the small local gigs that most benefit from local search, since nobody is running search ads for a Tuesday night show at a bar.

Where Roadshow fits

Roadshow builds a real website from a plain-language description of your band, and that site includes a tour dates page along with your bio, photos, and music player. You add or change dates by asking, and they exist on your own site — the source you actually control and the one search engines can find on their own schedule. It doesn't replace claiming your Bandsintown or Songkick page, but it solves the part most acts skip: having the date live somewhere text-based and permanent in the first place.