Marty presenting with Sophie at Digital Summit

New gates to a historic ground: Redesigning the MCG’s digital experience for an AI-driven audience

At the recent Optimizely Digital Summit, Luminary CEO Marty Drill hosted a fireside chat with Sophie Henderson from the Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC) about the MCG’s new website. The conversation offered lessons for anyone managing a digital experience in the modern age. 

Tami Iseli

17 August 2026

4 minute read

The MCG is more than just a stadium. In the words of Sophie Henderson, the Melbourne Cricket Club’s Executive Manager of Corporate Affairs, Marketing & Community, “It is the beating heart of Melbourne” – a 170-year-old icon that draws four million visitors through its gates every single year, hosts 60-plus major events across cricket, football, concerts and international spectacles, and opens its doors 365 days a year. 

Unusually for a major venue, the ground is not maintained by the government. Rather, it is funded and managed by the Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC), the largest sporting club in Australia, with over 180,000 members. 

The MCG’s typical workforce of around 7500 full-time-equivalent staff can swell to over 20,000 people on the biggest event days. The venue needed a website that could scale just as dramatically, as well as catering to the many different audiences it now serves. Optimizely was chosen as the platform and Luminary as the agency to meet those needs. 

Stats

Wayfinding in a multi-level stadium

One of the key challenges that Luminary tackled as part of this project was developing a tool to help people navigate their way around the stadium. For a venue with six levels, that was no mean feat. Most navigation tools – including Google Maps – are built for a flat, linear world: turn left, turn right, arrive. The MCG needed a more complex solution. Luminary worked with the MCC to build a bespoke wayfinding tool that solves for that verticality, giving patrons a way to plan a journey before they arrive and navigate the ground once they're there.

Content built for a new kind of visitor

In June this year, automated web traffic surpassed human traffic for the first time. According to Cloudflare data, non-human bots and AI agents now account for roughly 57 percent of online requests, leaving humans making up just 43 percent of all internet traffic. 

Over the past 12 months, the MCG and MCC have seen a 335 percent increase in AI-driven traffic. As Sophie explained, this has changed the game for their content strategy. AI planning tools are now helping fans decide whether to attend an event, which gate to use, what time to leave – and they are pulling all of that information from the website. 

If the information is not accurate, structured and up to date, the AI will get it wrong, and the patron experience will suffer. Getting it right means treating search and content structure as a discipline in its own right, tuned for both human readers and AI agents.

Cloudflare slide

A weekly rhythm of learning

Behind the scenes, the MCC runs a disciplined feedback loop. Every Monday, the business reviews how the weekend's events went: what worked, what didn't, what showed up in social media and search trends. On Wednesdays, the team previews the coming week's events and adjusts operational decisions based on what was learned. 

Through Optimizely’s Opal product, AI now plays a growing role in that loop too, surfacing what people were searching for and where the gaps were, so content can be refined event-by-event rather than being treated as one-size-fits-all. 

“You've got 100,000 stories in a single day, with completely different needs,” explained Sophie. The questions a first-time visitor to a Sunday afternoon AFL game needs answered are different from those a member with a $5000 corporate box ticket needs answered, and different again on a wet Saturday with a school-holiday crowd. “Now that we're bringing AI to the table, we’ve developed an ability to look through what people are searching for, identify what's missing, and what challenges that they had on that particular game, and then suggest content that we might be able to change for next week.”

Fewer complaints, better experiences

The payoff of the approach has been tangible. Since investing in a better digital experience and structuring content in line with the needs of AI, complaint volumes have dropped markedly. For a venue serving so many people with completely different needs (including its own staff), the accessibility of accurate information is critical. Positioning the website as that single source of truth has been fundamental to helping one of Australia's most beloved institutions transform its digital experience to meet the expectations of fans, members and AI agents alike. 

One source of truth

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