SeatGeek today made TourIQ available to promoters and venues, a product that estimates what a concert or other event could earn in a specific building on a specific date before any booking is agreed, then assigns a price to every seat ahead of the onsale. Stadium tours run by three of the largest promoters in the country already use it, according to SeatGeek, and the early results the New York company published alongside the release come from SeatGeek alone.

In Short

SeatGeek, a company that sells concert and sports tickets, built a computer tool that guesses how much money a show could make before anyone books it, and then picks a price for every single seat in the venue. That matters to the people who book concerts and run stadiums, and to fans too, because prices get worked out seat by seat instead of in a few big blocks. The results so far all come from SeatGeek itself, so nobody outside the company has yet checked whether the tool's guesses hold up across lots of shows.

Two steps before the onsale

TourIQ is built around two functions, which SeatGeek labels valuation and scaling. Both are aimed at decisions taken before a ticket exists: whether a venue bids for a show, how much a promoter commits to a tour, and where an artist chooses to play.

Valuation starts from three inputs. A booker enters an artist, a venue and a date, and TourIQ returns a projected value for the show, built from historical marketplace performance, current demand signals and relevant comparable events, according to SeatGeek. The live business calls those comparisons comps. SeatGeek's own illustration is deliberately hypothetical: a show by Olivia Rodrigo in a Denver stadium on a Friday in October, an event nobody has scheduled, which the model values anyway. The same function lets a venue see which artists and genres outperform in its market relative to the rest of the country, the release states, before anyone picks up the phone to make an offer.

Scaling comes next. In live-event terms, a scale is the set of price levels laid across a seating chart, and it has usually been built in blocks, with every seat in a section or tier carrying the same price. TourIQ instead prices seats according to what SeatGeek calls true seat-level value, so the price levels span the house seat by seat rather than following the tier a seat happens to sit in. The release gives a concrete case: "A corner seat in the lower bowl and a center seat one level up are often worth the same thing." TourIQ prices those two seats alike from the outset, according to SeatGeek, instead of leaving the mismatch to be corrected later with a discount.

What the model produces is described as production-ready. The model that values a show can also be used to put it on sale, according to the release, and SeatGeek says the resulting plan is one a box office can use as it stands, removing the manual work of building price levels show by show. For tours, one scaling model is applied from venue to venue inside minimum and maximum price guardrails set by the tour, rather than rebuilt from scratch in each city.

What goes into the model

The foundation is SeatGeek's own transaction history across primary sales, where tickets are first sold, and resale. The two source documents describe its depth differently. SeatGeek's pitch materials put it at 17 years of primary and resale transaction data; the release refers to nearly two decades. SeatGeek was founded in 2009, according to the release, so 17 years is the figure that matches the company's age. Live demand signals and broader market trends sit on top of that history.

The system is designed to feed itself. Every scaling TourIQ produces, and every onsale that follows, goes back into the model that values the next show, according to SeatGeek.

Noah Sarkey, Quantitative Research Manager for SeatGeekIQ, framed the problem as one of evidence rather than instinct. "Every experienced booker can tell you roughly what a show should do. What they haven't had is a way to prove it," he said in the release. The instinct, in his account, has been resting on "comps pulled by hand, a scale built in a spreadsheet and a lot of waiting for the onsale" to show whether the call was right.

Three results, one source

SeatGeek supplied three examples. None is presented as independently audited, and only one names a venue.

The most detailed concerns Nissan Stadium in Nashville and a college football game between Ole Miss and Louisville. It is a sports fixture, not a concert, although the release describes TourIQ as covering concerts and third-party events. According to SeatGeek, ticket volume under TourIQ's predictive scaling finished 29% ahead of the projection, gross revenue came in 13% above plan, and the average ticket cost 13% less than forecast.

The figures hang together, but only just. Volume up 29% at an average price 13% lower implies revenue roughly 12.2% above plan, since 1.29 multiplied by 0.87 gives 1.122, so the stated 13% depends on rounding in the inputs. The yardstick is also a forecast rather than a comparable event priced the conventional way. Neither document says who produced that projection, or whether TourIQ itself generated it.

The second example is a 2026 stadium tour opener, with artist and venue unnamed. Early sales left gaps in the lower bowl and slow movement in the upper levels, according to the release. Rather than cutting prices, TourIQ redistributed seats within the existing price levels to match their relative value, and the lagging sections converted. The show reached 93% sell-through, which SeatGeek says was six points above forecast, putting the forecast at roughly 87%. It also recorded 49% fewer pockets of unsold seats, a measure neither document defines; the pitch materials call them gaps.

The third carries the largest number and the softest footing. On a separate stadium show, pricing the building seat by seat rather than tier by tier "surfaced roughly $1 million in revenue that a conventional scale would have left on the table," according to the release. SeatGeek's pitch materials describe the same sum more cautiously, as potential additional revenue identified against a traditional tier-by-tier plan. Only one of those two plans could ever go on sale, which makes the $1 million a modelled difference rather than money counted at a box office.

What sits outside the three examples matters as much as what sits inside them. How many shows have run through TourIQ so far? How did the ones not cited perform? Neither document says.

Where TourIQ sits in SeatGeek's stack

TourIQ is the newest product from SeatGeekIQ, which SeatGeek describes as its marketplace intelligence engine and which, according to the release, already powers pricing and demand decisions for many of the largest names in sports and entertainment. The release calls TourIQ the first SeatGeekIQ product built specifically for live entertainment.

A division of labour appears only in the pitch materials. TourIQ handles advance valuation and pricing plans, while a separate product, PriceIQ, handles real-time pricing once tickets are on sale. TourIQ's job, in other words, ends at roughly the point where dynamic pricing has traditionally begun.

On the consumer side sits Ask SeatGeek, a conversational AI tool for event discovery which, according to the release, brought the same intelligence layer directly to fans. The two documents disagree on when it arrived. The release refers to the August debut of Ask SeatGeek; the pitch materials, dated today, describe it as last month's rollout, which would place it in September. A staged release could explain the gap, but neither document does.

ArinMichelle Casey, Head of Entertainment Partnerships at SeatGeek, described the data underneath as "the largest blended dataset of primary and resale ticket transactions in live entertainment." Neither document offers a transaction count, a ticket volume or a market comparison that would allow that claim to be checked. Casey set the product inside a wider ambition: "It's a great example of how we see SeatGeek as an intelligence partner, not just a ticketing vendor."

Availability is stated plainly, and little else is. TourIQ is available now to promoters and venues through SeatGeekIQ, according to SeatGeek, and was timed to arrive ahead of IEBA, the International Entertainment Buyers Association gathering. Pricing, contract terms, geographic coverage and the identities of the three promoters are not disclosed. The descriptions of those promoters also differ in strength. The pitch materials refer to TourIQ projects under way with them, including stadium shows, while the release says the product is "already in use on stadium tours." The first wording leaves room for pilots; the second suggests live deployment.

Ticket pricing under regulatory watch

TourIQ reaches the market while regulators in the United States and the United Kingdom are examining how ticket prices are built and displayed.

The Federal Trade Commission's Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees took effect on May 12, 2025, covering live-event tickets and short-term lodging and requiring the total price to be shown more prominently than any other figure. StubHub began refunding $10 million in fees over deceptive ticket pricing on April 9, 2026. In Britain, the Competition and Markets Authority opened investigations into StubHub and Viagogo on November 18, 2025 over mandatory charges added during purchase, with fines of up to 10% of global turnover available under its new powers. A Department for Business and Trade review cited in that coverage found drip pricing at 93% of event-ticket businesses examined. Neither SeatGeek document says whether TourIQ's price levels are set before or after fees, which is the number regulators have concentrated on.

A second line of scrutiny concerns how prices are personalised. On August 19, 2026, the FTC voted 2-0 to propose an enforcement policy statement treating undisclosed personalized pricing as a likely violation of Section 5, two weeks after the Senate held its first hearing on surveillance pricing on August 4. The Commission's statement separates prices that move with supply and demand for everyone in a market, which it treats as unremarkable, from prices set according to what an individual is estimated to be willing to pay.

TourIQ, as SeatGeek describes it, falls on the first side of that line: prices attach to seats and dates before any buyer arrives, and neither document lists personal data as an input to seat prices. Casey's description of infrastructure that "gets smarter with every fan interaction, before, during, and after the sale," set beside a consumer assistant drawing on the same intelligence layer, does leave one question open. Which fan-side signals, if any, reach the products sold to promoters and venues? The documents do not specify.

Resale is the other backdrop. The FTC sued a group of ticket brokers on August 18, 2025, alleging they used thousands of fake accounts to buy 379,776 tickets worth $57 million, including 2,280 Taylor Swift tickets later resold for more than $1.9 million. The gap between face value and what buyers will pay later is what made that operation worthwhile. TourIQ is trained in part on resale transactions, which record exactly that gap, and SeatGeek says the aim is to align prices with seat value from the start, reducing the later price swings that can leave early buyers feeling penalised.

Why it matters for the marketing community

Anyone who trades media will recognise the structure. Tier pricing works much like a rate card: one published price for a block of inventory, whatever any single unit in that block is actually worth. Programmatic trading moved digital advertising away from that model towards prices discovered impression by impression, with a price floor as the seller's minimum. The tour-level guardrails in TourIQ play a comparable role for seats, bounding the price from below and above. The logic resembles yield management in publishing, where the value of each impression rather than the page it sits on sets the price, and sell-side pricing has kept moving in that direction: Index Exchange rolled out per-impression dynamic take rates on October 23, 2025, reporting 4% revenue gains for publishers. Concert pricing is reaching the same granularity later, and before the sale rather than during it.

Distribution is shifting at the same time. Google's agentic AI features in Search began searching Ticketmaster, StubHub, SeatGeek and Vivid Seats together for event tickets for US Labs users on November 17, 2025, returning a curated list with a link to each seller. On September 23, 2026, SeatGeek joined the Connected Apps roster in Gemini in a lifestyle group, alongside a Ticketmaster integration that was already listed. When an assistant sets several sellers' inventory side by side, the price attached to a seat becomes one of the few attributes that can be compared directly. Commerce standards for those agents, such as Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, have drawn criticism since January 2026 for the potential to enable surveillance pricing, a charge Google disputed.

Demand itself is not in doubt. A Video Advertising Bureau deck published on September 29 cited Ipsos data showing 55% of US adults rated attending in-person events important or very important to expressing their fandom, rising to 66% among those aged 18 to 34. The commercial argument for seat-level scaling is about how that demand is spread across a building. A house priced to seat value sells "across the whole map instead of in patches," according to the release, which SeatGeek says means fewer distressed sections and fewer late discounts. Fewer late discounts would also mean fewer last-minute campaigns built to announce them, a change that touches promoters' media plans as much as their box office.

Whether any of that holds beyond three examples, one of them a football game, is the question SeatGeek's own material does not yet answer. The model gets better with every onsale, by the company's account. The evidence that it does so has, for now, been published by the company alone.

Timeline

Summary

Who: SeatGeek, the New York ticketing company founded in 2009, through its SeatGeekIQ marketplace intelligence unit. Noah Sarkey, Quantitative Research Manager for SeatGeekIQ, and ArinMichelle Casey, Head of Entertainment Partnerships, are quoted in the release. The product is aimed at promoters, venues and bookers, with three of the largest promoters in the country named as users but not identified.

What: TourIQ, a predictive product with two functions: valuation, which projects what a show is worth from an artist, a venue and a date, and scaling, which prices every seat according to seat-level value rather than by tier. SeatGeek cites three early results, including a Nissan Stadium football game where ticket volume ran 29% ahead of projection and revenue 13% above plan at an average price 13% lower, a 2026 tour opener that reached 93% sell-through, and roughly $1 million in modelled additional revenue on another stadium show. Real-time pricing after the onsale stays with a separate product, PriceIQ.

When: Today, October 2, 2026, ahead of IEBA. The release places the debut of the consumer tool Ask SeatGeek in August, while SeatGeek's pitch materials describe it as a September rollout.

Where: Available to promoters and venues through SeatGeekIQ, with stadium tours as the reported deployments. Geographic coverage, pricing and contract terms are not disclosed.

Why: Booking a show commits large sums on limited data, and tier-based price scales often leave seats priced out of line with what buyers will pay for them, according to SeatGeek. The product arrives as US and UK regulators examine ticket fees, drip pricing and personalised pricing, and as AI assistants from Google begin placing several ticket sellers' inventory side by side, while every performance figure behind it so far comes from SeatGeek itself.