For most of the twentieth century, you found out about a local museum the same way you found out about anything local: someone told you. A conversation in the pub, a feature in the local newspaper, a notice in the library, a listing in a printed guidebook published six years ago and only partially accurate even then. The information existed, but it moved slowly and unevenly, constrained by geography, social networks, and the limits of print.
The internet changed that, of course. But perhaps not as completely as we might have expected — and not equally for every kind of institution.
The Google effect
When Google became the default way to find things, museums with substantial web presences, high visitor numbers, and strong brand recognition benefited enormously. The British Museum, the National Railway Museum, the Tate galleries — institutions that were already well-known became even more discoverable. Search algorithms reward popularity, content volume, and inbound links. The institutions that already had those things got more of them.
For smaller museums, the picture was different. A volunteer-run collection with a three-page website, no active social media presence, and a handful of TripAdvisor reviews is not going to surface near the top of any meaningful search. It is, for practical purposes, invisible to anyone who doesn't already know it exists. The internet did not solve the discoverability problem for Britain's smaller heritage institutions. In some ways, it may have made it worse by concentrating attention even more firmly on those that were already prominent.
Search algorithms reward popularity and content volume. The institutions that already had those things got more of them. For smaller museums, the digital era has been a mixed blessing at best.
The tools that exist
There are resources that attempt to address this. TripAdvisor has become, somewhat accidentally, one of the most comprehensive directories of UK visitor attractions in existence — but it is structured around reviews and rankings, which means it still privileges the already-popular, and its coverage of very small or recently opened institutions is patchy at best. The VisitEngland, VisitScotland, and VisitWales sites list attractions by region, but their coverage is far from complete and their interfaces are not built for genuine discovery.
Many local authority websites maintain directories of heritage attractions in their areas, but these are frequently out of date, inconsistently formatted, and impossible to search across boundaries. A museum that sits on the border between two local authority areas may appear in neither directory, or both, with conflicting information.
The museum sector itself has produced various aggregation attempts over the years. Collections Online and similar initiatives have done valuable work in making object records searchable across multiple institutions, but they are designed for researchers rather than casual visitors, and they don't help someone trying to work out what is within an hour's drive of where they live.
What good discovery looks like
The model that works — the one that genuinely changes the relationship between people and heritage — is geographic, visual, and comprehensive. It is a map that shows you everything in a given area, regardless of size or marketing budget. It is a search tool that lets you filter by type, period, or topic, so that someone interested in industrial history can find every relevant institution from Tyneside to the Black Country without having to know any of them by name in advance. It is a system that doesn't require an institution to invest in digital marketing to be found — it just needs to exist.
That is, in broad terms, what Experience History is trying to build. Not a replacement for the individual institution's website, but a layer above it — a way of making the whole landscape navigable in a way that no individual institution, and no general-purpose search engine, can provide.
The best discovery tool doesn't require an institution to invest in SEO to be found. It just requires it to exist.
The next chapter
The pace of change in how people seek out experiences is accelerating. The shift from desktop to mobile has already happened; the shift from search to recommendation — where algorithms surface things you didn't know you were looking for, based on what you've shown interest in before — is well underway. Voice search, AI-assisted planning, and hyperlocal discovery tools are all changing the shape of what 'finding a museum' looks like.
For heritage institutions, the challenge is not simply to have a website and a social media presence. It is to be findable through the channels through which people actually discover new experiences — channels that are increasingly curated, geographic, and interest-led rather than keyword-driven. The institutions that navigate that shift well will find genuinely new audiences. Those that don't risk becoming even more invisible than they already are.
The good news is that the information problem is, in principle, solvable. The museums, the events, the local history groups — they exist. Getting them connected to the people who would love them is a challenge of infrastructure and will, not of fundamental scarcity. That's worth being optimistic about.
