A lot of nonprofits I talk to are understandably overwhelmed when asked about AI SEO.
There are new acronyms every week and a lot of people are trying to sell “the next thing.” My perspective is a bit more grounded: AI search is changing how results are generated, but the underlying signals still look a lot like traditional SEO.
A lot of nonprofits lag behind the market standard—not because they don’t care but because there’s only so much capacity to chase every shift. The risk now is that best practices are still emerging, and this is one of those moments where getting in early matters.
The earlier you stake your place in these indexes and build trust signals, the better positioned you will be when everything settles into a new standard, especially for mission-critical searches like local food support, medical research or cause credibility.
AI SEO marketing is essentially a hyper-personalized evolution of traditional SEO—one that shifts discovery away from those 10 blue links on the search results page and toward summarized answers that can include citations, links and other elements.
Traditional SEO is foundational here. I think of SEO as the front door of a potential user experience. When someone wants information—anything from, “Where do I donate?” to, “Is this organization legit?”—they open a browser and go straight to a search bar. SEO is how you show up at that first step.
AI SEO marketing differs from traditional SEO in a few key ways:
AI search engines are shifting discovery away from the traditional results page and toward a layer that filters and summarizes information before someone clicks.
For every AI overview search, Google does a “query fan-out.” In plain terms it means the system is trying to interpret a long complex question by branching into related sub-questions—almost like running a set of decision trees—based on what it assumes the user is trying to accomplish.
The biggest behavior change I’m seeing is that people are asking longer questions. The questions are more specific and more nuanced. And the AI layer is increasingly answering those questions directly, ahead of the traditional search results.
From a nonprofit perspective, this matters because donor discovery often involves deeper evaluation. Donors are trying to understand credibility and impact beyond just looking for a nonprofit homepage. You’ll see donors ask questions like:
So the shift isn’t only about just “being found”: it’s about whether your organization answers those more in-depth questions.
Yes. It’s just changing how we measure success and how we structure content.
On one hand, everything feels like it’s changing because the interface is changing. On the other hand, a lot of the same signals are still being used. These answer engines rely on crawlers and indexes, and those crawlers are still looking for many of the foundational SEO signals.
The bigger shift is that clicks are dropping, in many cases because people are getting answers directly in the answer engine. Historically, we looked at organic traffic and clicks as the gold standard. That’s getting harder as more of the journey happens without a click.
So, what do you do? You focus on making sure your content can be sourced and served and you track signals like impressions, which tell you how often your content is being shown and used by these systems.
Things are still early, but that doesn’t mean you do nothing. If anything, it means you double down on what is consistently true: Make your site easy to crawl, easy to understand and easy to cite.
Here are the strategies I’m recommending to nonprofits right now:
If you want to get cited in AI search overview, the goal is to make your content easy for an answer engine to trust and extract. That comes down to structure and credibility.
A few practical ways to do that:
This is where a lot of nonprofits can win. Donors want meaning, and they want verification. If your site can provide that in a structured way, you’re giving answer engines something solid to cite.
My closing advice here is going to be boring, but it’s true: Don’t jump on too many trends too quickly.
There are misnomers, “silver bullets” and even people flat-out making things up. When AI mode first launched, there was noise about things like an “AI.txt” file or "llms.txt" file, similar to robots.txt. That kind of junk distracts teams from what actually moves the needle.
Instead, focus on practical things, like:
AI SEO marketing is the practice of structuring your website and content so AI search engines can discover it, understand it and cite it in generated answers.
AI search engines often generate a summarized answer first by interpreting complex queries, pulling from indexed sources and citing content they can extract and trust.
Yes, but clicks may drop as answers happen inside the engine, so organizations need to focus on crawlability, indexability and being cited. Another reason traditional SEO still matters is “voice” search, which triggers from traditional keywords and phrases. And with Apple and Google partnering, searching via Siri will make “voice” search even easier.