AI helped traffic at football website Goal grow by 42% during the 2026 World Cup compared to the previous tournament, publisher Footballco has said.

Footballco said page views were boosted by the use of its AI assistant Goal-e, which is trained on 20 years of Goal’s content.

The growth came despite the arrival of Google’s AI Overviews and algorithm changes at platforms like Facebook since 2022.

Goal-e is being used to create content like team summaries, related questions and interactive answers. It also translates articles into different languages and can be used to create illustrations.

Goal-e content is marked with labels such as “AI-generated”, “AI-assisted”, “AI-translated” and “AI-generated/altered media” for images, video and audio.

As well as its biggest website Goal, Footballco also publishes brands including Arabic-language Kooora, Calciomercato (Italian), Spox (German) and Voetbalzone (Dutch) and quarterly print magazine Mundial.

Chief technology officer Nigel Leigh said: “By rolling out Goal-e across Goal, we’ve been able to surface content created by our journalists in many local markets globally at speed and with ease, through assisted translation. This works because Goal is known for covering the biggest players and competitions, and these teams and players are of interest everywhere.

“In one example, an article on the World Cup final, written by one of our Dutch Voetbalzone journalists, was translated for the Japanese edition of Goal, where it racked up 803,000 page views.

“By using AI to translate selected articles, it’s freed up journalists to create more original and deeper content – expanding editorial output on themes such as football-adjacent culture, fashion, and business, which is now being pushed to the front through Goal’s redesigned homepage.”

Press Gazette previously reported that Goal-e’s suggested questions and AI answers were helping to increase time on site, reducing the impact on revenue even as traffic was falling last year.

Goal World Cup page views up 55% compared to 2022

Footballco said more than 114 million users visited its combined brands during the World Cup, up 22% compared to the 2022 tournament. They generated more than 1.1 billion page views, according to Google Analytics.

Goal registered 77 million web and app users during the 2026 World Cup, which ran between 11 June and 19 July, meaning growth of 42% compared to 2022.

The figures also said Goal received 439 million web and app page views across the tournament, up 55% from 2022.

Kooora received 26 million users but an outsized 494 million page views.

According to Comscore figures seen by Press Gazette, the Footballco portfolio beat The Athletic and ESPNFC for US users during the tournament.

According to Similarweb, global visits to goal.com hit their two-year peak in July, with 95 million visits. Visits increased most months in the six months leading up to the World Cup, almost doubling since the start of the year.

Global visits then fell 35% month on month in August after the World Cup had finished according to Similarweb’s initial estimated data.

Leigh said: “The World Cup is where Goal and the wider Footballco business does what it does best – cover football through a global lens to an enormous global audience while leveraging local expertise.

“But with fans having more choice than ever and the web changing through the proliferation of AI, it’s even more impressive and a testament to Footballco’s World Cup strategy that we managed to surpass where we were after the World Cup in Qatar.”

Footballco was formed by spinning Goal and other brands out from DAZN in 2020 with backing from private equity firm TPG Capital.

Since then, the publisher says, it has been profitable every year in its core business except for a single-digit loss in 2023 due to investments in growth areas being made. Companies House accounts show losses each year (of £9.1m in 2025), which the publisher told Press Gazette was attributed to amortisation of IP and investment in the US.

CEO Juan Delgado explained: “Since launching Footballco’s US business in 2024, we’ve invested heavily in our US operations, which has been reflected not only in regard to our brands’ growth in the market across both men’s and women’s football, but also in the brands we’ve partnered with. The result has been an eight-fold increase in revenue over the past three years.”

Last year Footballco made revenue of £55m (up 13% year on year) as it diversified away from a reliance on display and programmatic advertising.

That traditional online ad revenue was down 12% to £18.2m while branded content and campaigns were up 39% to £26.2m (overtaking display and programmatic ads for the first time) and affiliate revenue grew by 21% to £10.2m.

Affiliate growth has continued so far this year: the publisher told Press Gazette revenue from affiliate content will deliver more than $12.6m (£9.3m) in the first half of 2026, up 23% compared to 2025. More than $2.5m (£1.9m) of that was during the World Cup.

Leigh said this was a result of long-term planning, noting the first World Cup ticket-buying article was published in December 2025.

Using AI has helped Footballco create ten times as much affiliate content, which also includes links for TV and streaming services and betting companies, as it did before the rollout of Goal-e.

Delgado told Press Gazette in November that SEO-driven articles that contain a lot of affiliate links, for example match previews and team line-ups, are now largely automated.

“Google can rank you higher because you have those updated stats, data points, then you’re going to do better. Hence, that’s where our focus is, in populating all this stuff. All of this stuff is automated now.”

Action such as this has helped Footballco withstand the traffic threat from Google AI Overviews.

Footballco grew the proportion of its traffic coming from organic search during the World Cup compared to the 2022 tournament, going from 58% to 65%. AI Overviews have been slowly rolling out, starting with the US and then the UK, meaning other countries globally including some of Footballco’s other key markets have been less affected by the hit to clickthroughs from search.

Organic social referrals fell from making up 8% of total traffic to 1% after Facebook deprioritised publisher links in 2023.

Across social media, Footballco saw seven billion total views across its content during the World Cup, of which 3.6 billion came from Goal and Kooora contributed 2.2 billion views.

The rest were spread across personality-led and athlete-driven shows such as Beast Mode On podcast, The Late Run and Goal’s Front Three. Delgado said last year these were a “growth lever” bringing in sponsorship revenue in which Footballco was investing.

Most of Footballco’s World Cup social views were on Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram, which drove 5.8 billion views. Tiktok drove 444 million and Youtube contributed 282 million.

Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our “Letters Page” blog