What do your visitors value—and what keeps them coming back?

Every year, AAM and Wilkening Consulting set out to answer this question with the Annual Survey of Museum-Goers. Partnering with museums across the country, we study what makes visitors tick, give individual museums insights into their own audiences, and build a national picture of the people who visit museums and what matters to them. Meanwhile, we conduct a separate broader population survey to see how the views of these consistent museum patrons compare to those of the public overall.

Then comes the extra fun part: throughout the next year, the team releases the results of these surveys through regularly published Data Stories going deep into the data. With the 2025 research cycle complete, we’ve rounded up the six most revealing insights.

As we begin sharing the 2026 findings, enrollment is now open for the 2027 edition, with a special early bird rate on fees if you sign up by December 1. Don’t miss your chance to get up close and personal with your visitors’ motivations and contribute to illuminating fieldwide data like you’ll read in this post.

Here are six key findings that offer a window into who museum visitors are and what they’re looking for from museums today:

1. Visitors are getting more diverse.

Museum people have long been attuned to demographic skews in their audiences, understanding visitors to be whiter, older, and more educated than Americans on average. But the last several years of the Annual Survey have discovered rapid change on that front.

While the most frequent museum-goers continue to fit the stereotypical pattern—with 83 percent holding a college degree and 84 percent identifying themselves or someone in their household as white—the picture has changed dramatically for those who visit casually (as few as one museum in the past year).

Among this group, only 47 percent hold a college degree, only 35 percent are white (not Hispanic or Latine), and only 26 percent are 60 or older. In fact, white respondents are the most likely to report “never” visiting museums (while Asians and Asian Americans are the most likely to report visiting), and adults over 60 are the least likely of any age/life stage group to have visited in the past year (while parents or guardians of minor children are the most likely).

After suddenly narrowing several years ago, these “incidence gaps” have stayed down ever since, leaving the researchers to confidently conclude that “a new pattern has emerged.” Nonetheless, they do remain for some individual museums and some museum types (such as historic sites).

2. Museums’ attendance problems are a repeat visitation problem.

Declines in attendance have been well-documented since the start of the pandemic, often attributed to factors like reduced travel and economic uncertainty. But in parsing visitation patterns by frequency, the Annual Survey has found a more complicated story.

In 2024 and 2025, 33 percent of US adults reported going to a museum in the past year, which is actually an increase over pre-pandemic norms of 25 to 31 percent. Likewise, the breadth of different museums they visit has mostly rebounded since 2022, though it remains slightly below pre-pandemic numbers.

But the one metric that still lags significantly behind is frequency of visits—how much more than once a year people are going. In the six years since the pandemic began, this repeat visitation has leveled off into a lower “new normal” that seems to reflect enduring changes in behavior. In other words, it’s not whether people are visiting museums that’s causing attendance shortfalls; it’s how often.

3. Americans overwhelmingly trust museums.

Decades of research have proven that museums are highly trusted—among the most trusted institutions in public life, in fact. But halfway into a decade that has brought misinformation epidemics, growing institutional skepticism, and direct political attacks on the interpretive work of museums, has our field’s reputation held up?

In thoroughly examining the issue of trust, the Annual Survey has returned an emphatic, resounding yes. Not only has trust remained stable into the 2020s; it’s actually increased on several fronts.

In a broader population survey in January of this year, 99 percent of Americans said they trusted museums. Asked why, they most often cited our institutions’ reliance on evidence and research, track record of truth and accuracy, emphasis on diverse perspectives, and professionally dedicated staff.

The survey also revisited how museums stack up to other informational sources, finding that museums now trail the two tied in first place—friends and family and public libraries—by only a single decimal point on a scale of one to ten, at a 7.3 average. (The next runner-up, researchers and scientists, scored a 6.9.) This number has only increased in recent years, coming in at 6.4 in 2021 and 7.2 in 2025.

Even more reassuringly, these patterns of high and growing trust hold true across the political spectrum, from conservatives to moderates to liberals, though on average liberals place slightly higher trust.

But trust is not to be taken for granted, so the survey also asked Americans how museums can actively earn their confidence going forward. The most common answers? Transparency about processes and sourcing, curiosity toward multiple viewpoints, and openness to let visitors make up their own minds.

4. The public has big concerns about AI in museums.

There is one issue poised to radically rock Americans’ confidence in our institutions: whether and how we adopt generative AI into our operations.

In an open-ended question about issues that could affect their trust going forward, survey respondents delivered an unprompted outpouring of concern about the technology, including that it would dilute the accuracy and integrity of information, supplant dedicated museum staff, shift focus off human creation, trade in unethical borrowing of human creators’ work, and go undisclosed to visitors.

So intense was the concern that the researchers followed up with a separate broader population survey in early 2026 for more quantitative data. Among those respondents:

• 43 percent said they expected human beings to “develop all content from museums, including exhibitions, emails…everything.”
• 29 percent said they were okay with AI use for emails and website text but not exhibitions.
• 19 percent said they were okay with it for brainstorming but not writing exhibition text.
• 9 percent said they were okay with any use, including in exhibitions.

If museums were to use generative AI, 45 percent said they would want it disclosed every time, 36 percent said they would want to know for things like exhibitions but not marketing, and 19 percent said they would not need to know at all.

The data revealed some generational differences on the issue, with younger adults more likely to expect humans to do everything and older adults more likely to want transparency.

5. Inclusion has broad support.

Recent years have seen a dramatic shift in the public discourse on diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion. Between political pushback and a corporate retreat on formal programs and initiatives, a narrative has cemented that public opinion has swung away from supporting efforts to deliberately elevate or include marginalized people.

But is it actually the public rejecting these values, or a smaller minority of decision-makers? When it comes to museums, at least, the Annual Survey delivers a definitive answer. As of 2025, the majority of US adults—and the majority of museum-goers—still want museums to share inclusive content.

In fact, among the demographically representative sample of US adults, inclusive attitudes have increased in recent years, from 44 percent of the population in 2021 to 53 percent in 2025. And the pattern holds true across age and political affiliation. While younger people and liberals show the most inclusive attitudes, the majority of all age segments and the majority of conservatives still fall on the side of inclusion.

Aside from inclusion, the survey found there are other enduring shared values across party lines—particularly family, education, and civility—that museums can lean on to build trust.

6. Museums are socializing powerhouses.

This year’s Annual Survey took a special look at how well museums are helping people socialize, and the news is stellar. Respondents overwhelmingly saw museums as excellent places for social connection, set apart by the quality of conversations they catalyze and the learning, exploration, and curiosity they engender. (Though the interest in “learning” was higher among frequent museum-goers than more sporadic ones, of whom only a third cited it as a desirable leisure time activity.)

While museums already excel at offering outstanding social opportunities, the survey did surface some possible ways to do even better. Aside from exhibitions to walk through, respondents said they most wanted dining options, outdoor spaces, and places to sit and talk to help them connect with friends and family.

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Taken together, these findings paint a heartening picture of how Americans feel about museums and the values and practices we can lean into to sustain their support. They also reveal audiences are changing, from expanding demographics, to contracting attendance patterns, to new concerns about technology and transparency.

That makes it the perfect time to find out how your visitors are feeling now. Enroll in the Annual Survey by December 1 to get the best rate on personalized data for your institution, including custom survey questions, individual statistics, and access to data cuts based on museum type, budget size, and location.