Section one
How people find pubs: planning as default behaviour.
Planning is now central to the customer journey. Consumers routinely research venues before visiting: checking menus, reading reviews, scanning photos and looking at upcoming events. Digital discovery is the default starting point.
Two established channels dominate: recommendations from friends and family (63%) and internet search (62%). Their relative importance varies by age: older adults lean towards personal recommendations (70% of over-65s), while younger adults favour search (75% of 25-34s). Both are core to the discovery process.
Social media is the third most cited source at 37%, driven heavily by under-35s (61-62%) and women (41% versus 32% of men). AI is notable as an emerging source (14%), especially among the 25-34 cohort. A third report using this channel to plan out a night out.
62% of consumers research via channels before visiting.
Pints & Profits, 2026
Digital premises are not a supplement to physical ones. For the 62% of consumers who research online before visiting, they are the first point of contact. A pub that does not appear in search results, AI recommendations or social media feeds is, for a growing proportion of consumers, a pub that does not exist.
This has direct implications for how pubs manage their digital presence. AI tools synthesise information from websites,reviews, menus and structured data to generate recommendations. Pubs with rich, accurate and well-structured online content surface in AI-generated answers. Those without it risk being excluded from a growing discovery channel, particularly among the most commercially active age group.
The visibility implications are significant. For pubs without accurate, well-structured online content, the risk is not simply lower search rankings, it is exclusion from an AI-generated shortlist that an increasing proportion of the most commercially active consumers never looks beyond. Managing that visibility requires professional attention to search optimisation, content freshness, review profiles and structured data. This is the practical infrastructure of digital presence.
Section two
What people look for: food quality first and reviews last
Experience has become more finely judged. Customers are less forgiving of poor service, outdated menus or unclear offers when they are paying more and visiting less often.
| Priority | Overall | 18-24 | 25-34 | 35-44 | 45-54 | 55-64 | 65+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Food quality | 2.82 | 2.65 | 2.69 | 2.84 | 2.93 | 2.89 | 2.85 |
| 2 Location | 2.90 | 3.14 | 3.06 | 2.92 | 2.82 | 2.92 | 2.70 |
| 3 Price | 2.91 | 2.86 | 2.93 | 3.06 | 2.92 | 2.84 | 2.84 |
| 4 Ambiance | 3.06 | 2.95 | 3.06 | 2.90 | 3.13 | 3.04 | 3.20 |
| 5 Online reviews | 3.31 | 3.40 | 3.26 | 3.28 | 3.20 | 3.32 | 3.40 |
Food quality ranks first overall in our survey and first or second in every age cohort. Location becomes more important with age, reflecting practical constraints. Price is weighted similarly across all groups. Online reviews, despite their role in discovery, rank last everywhere. This suggests that they function as a filter rather than a primary driver of choice.
Food quality is what consumers care about most.
Pints & Profits, 2026
Women rank food quality higher than men (2.73 versus 2.92), reinforcing the importance of food-led messaging. These are nuances rather than fundamental differences, but they matter when designing content strategies.
The ranking tells a clear story about where professional marketing efforts should focus. Food quality is what consumers care about most, but it is also what they need to be shown before they visit. High-quality food photography, up-to-date menus and seasonal specials clearly communicated are the primary currency of visibility for a food-led audience.
Reviews, meanwhile, function as a reassurance mechanism: consumers check them, but they do not always seek them out. The professional task is to ensure the review profile is healthy and current, not to treat reviews as the centrepiece of a content strategy.
Section three
Which content cuts through.
The content that consumers engage with most points towards reassurance over aspiration.
Special offers and promotions lead at 58% - consistent across genders and broadly stable across age groups. Photos of food and drinks engage 41%, peaking among 25-44s. Events and activities content shows the most extreme age variation: 69% of 25-34s engage with it, compared with just eight per cent of over-65s.
Reviews and testimonials are actively engaged with by only 23%, reinforcing their role as a background check rather than a content draw.
The message is clear: content must be planned around what audiences engage with, not what is easiest to produce. Promotions, food photography and event listings deliver the highest returns because they reduce uncertainty and give consumers a reason to choose one venue over another. A simple content calendar covering these three areas, refreshed weekly, will outperform intermittent or reactive posting every time.
Section four
After the visit: the silent majority
The key marketing shift is from persuasion to reassurance. Consumers are not looking to be convinced to like pubs. They are looking to be confident they have made the right choice.
The post-visit data tells an equally important story. There is a significant gap between social media consumption and social media creation in the pub context. Only 37% of adults post about their pub experience always or sometimes. 38% never post at all. The age gradient is dramatic: 64% of 25-34s post at least sometimes, falling to just 13% of over-65s
64%
of 25-34s post about visits at least sometimes.
13%
of over-65s post. A dramatic age gradient.
40%
of 25-34s respond to incentivised posting. The most responsive cohort.
The primary motivation is personal interest in sharing (51%), followed by incentives (29%) and encouragement from the venue (22%). Incentive-driven posting is highest among 25-34s (40%), confirming this cohort as both the most active and the most responsive to structured prompts.
Social media posting about pub visits, by age
Review behaviour follows the same pattern
Only 39% of adults are likely to leave a review, with the figure dropping from two-thirds among 25-34s to 19% among over 65s. The primary factor is overall satisfaction (61%), with negative experiences and incentives cited at similar levels (27% each).
User-generated content is concentrated among younger adults and is not a passive outcome. It requires active facilitation through incentives, on-site prompts and content-friendly environments. The risk for operators who rely on organic review accumulation is that their review profile under-represents satisfied customers and over-represents the dissatisfied.
This is where professionalised marketing makes a measurable difference. Venues that actively prompt reviews, create shareable moments and incentivise posting generate a virtuous cycle: more content leads to greater visibility, which drives more visits. Those who leave it to chance rely on the minority who post unprompted, and that minority skews dissatisfied.
Likelihood to leave an online review, by age
Section five
Looking ahead: the visibility imperative.
Consumer behaviour points towards a more deliberate, value-conscious pub-goer. Success will favour operators who understand how digital behaviours shape physical decisions and design their marketing around confidence, clarity and experience rather than volume.
The challenge is not uniform. The 25-34 cohort is the most digitally active, the most frequent visitor, the most likely to post and review, and the earliest adopter of AI discovery tools. Over-55s remain anchored in word of mouth and non-digital channels. Effective marketing in 2026 requires segmented strategies that reflect these realities
Treat digital presence as infrastructure, not marketing.
Pints & Profits, 2026
The two themes running through this report, visibility and the professionalisation of marketing, converge in a single practical question: can an operator be found, chosen and recommended by the people most likely to visit? For a growing number of consumers, that question is answered digitally before they ever walk through the door.The evidence presented in this report makes the case for treating digital presence as infrastructure, not marketing.
Just as a pub invests in its building to remain open for business, it must invest in its digital premises to remain visible to the consumers who will decide whether to walk through the door. The pubs that do this well, with professional, structured, audience-aware marketing, will be the pubs that remain visible. And in a sector where demand is real but increasingly mediated by digital behaviour, visibility is the difference between a full house and an empty one
Marketing effectiveness is increasingly measured not by reach alone, but by the ability to reduce uncertainty at the point of decision. Clear information, credible reviews, up-to-date content and consistent delivery matter more than promotional hype. That is the standard consumers are now setting.
