WHAT AI search means for purpose-driven organisations
The way people find you is changing faster than at any point since Google first arrived. AI Overviews, Google's AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini — more and more, your supporters are getting their answer at the top of the page, in a tidy AI-generated summary, without ever clicking through to a website. Yours included.
For charities and nonprofits, which often come up when someone searches for a cause, a condition or a question, this is an emergency. But it’s also an opportunity — and the organisations that understand it early will pull ahead of those that don’t. Here's what's actually happening, why it matters most in our sector, and what I'd do about it.
What is "AI search", and how is it different from the Google we knew?
AI search is the shift from a list of blue links to a generated answer. Instead of pointing you to ten websites, the search engine reads them for you and writes a summary on the spot.
In practice, it's a few things at once. There are AI Overviews, the AI-written box that now sits above the traditional results for a growing share of Google searches. There's AI Mode, Google's full chatbot-style search experience. And there's the rise of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini as places people now go instead of Google to research a topic, compare options or ask "which charity should I support for X?"
The common thread: the answer increasingly lives on the results page, not on your website. Which means the old goal — rank in the top few links and win the click — is no longer the whole game.
Is AI search really taking traffic away from websites?
Yes. The evidence is now hard to argue with, and it's worse than the early reassurances suggested.
The most rigorous study to date is a recent field experiment from researchers at the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon, reported by Search Engine Journal. Rather than just spotting a correlation, they randomly hid AI Overviews for some users and measured the difference — and found AI Overviews cut clicks to external websites by 38% on the queries where they appeared. Zero-click searches, where the user gets what they need and never leaves Google, jumped from 54% to 72%.
The correlational studies paint an even starker picture for the most exposed content. Marketing agency Seer Interactive analysed millions of impressions and found that, on informational queries with an AI Overview present, organic click-through rates fell by around 61% and paid click-through rates by around 68%. Separately, Ahrefs reported a 58% drop in the number-one organic result when an AI Overview shows up. And Pew Research found that users clicked a traditional result in just 8% of sessions that included an AI Overview, compared with 15% without.
In fairness — and because I'd rather you trusted the nuance than the panic — it isn't uniformly catastrophic. Semrush's analysis of hundreds of thousands of keywords found that for some terms, people actually clicked slightly more once an AI Overview appeared, and that the overall zero-click rate hasn't been climbing as relentlessly as the headlines suggest. The picture is messier than "AI is killing the web."
But the direction of travel is not in doubt. Search is becoming a place where you get your answer and stay put. For organisations whose digital strategy assumes a steady flow of search traffic, that's a core shift, not a footnote.
Why does this hit purpose-driven organisations harder than most?
Because the exact content that AI Overviews are best at swallowing is the exact content that charities produce most of.
AI Overviews are triggered most often by informational and "how-to" queries — definitions, explanations, "what is", "how do I", "best way to". Think about how much of a charity's content estate looks like that: condition and symptom information, awareness-raising explainers, "how to support someone who…", guides for first-time donors, eligibility and "how do I apply" pages. This is some of the most valuable work we do — and it's precisely what an AI is happiest to summarise without sending the click.
Then layer on a second problem that's specific to our sector. Fewer than 10% of charities rate their in-house SEO skills as excellent — something I wrote about in Why Your Digital Fundraising Strategy Needs More SEO. If you were already under-resourced for organic search, you're now being asked to adapt to a harder version of it, often with a smaller budget than the commercial brands you're competing against for the same answer box.
So the squeeze is real: more of your content is exposed, and the sector is, on average, less equipped to respond. That's the bad news. The good news is that the response is the same in principle: make your content clearer, stronger and easier for AI to trust.
Isn't this just an organic problem? What about our paid media?
It's not just organic — and this is the part most people miss. Paid is being transformed too, and by the same underlying force.
The click-through data above showed paid CTRs falling alongside organic when an AI Overview appears. But the bigger story is strategic. For years, Google has been steadily handing control away from the marketer and towards the machine: broad match quietly widening which searches your ads show against, Performance Max collapsing campaign types into one AI-run black box, natural-language processing deciding intent on your behalf. The throughline is the same — Google's systems make more of the decisions, and you get fewer granular levers to pull.
AI Overviews are that exact philosophy arriving in organic search. The machine reads, decides and answers; your job shifts from controlling placement to earning trust. Once you see paid and organic as two fronts of the same move, the strategic response becomes clearer — so act by leaning in, not pulling back.
Does this mean SEO is dead for charities and nonprofits?
No — and anyone telling you that hasn't read the data properly. SEO matters more now, not less. But the goal has changed: from winning the click to becoming the source the AI trusts enough to cite.
The old goal was to rank and win the click. The new goal is to become the source the AI trusts enough to cite. Here's the finding that should reframe your whole approach: in that same Seer study, brands cited inside an AI Overview earned around 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than brands that weren't. Being in the response is the new being on page one.
This is why you'll hear new acronyms floating about — GEO (generative engine optimisation) and AEO (answer engine optimisation). Don't let the jargon put you off. It's the same discipline you already know, repointed: instead of optimising purely to rank, you optimise to be understood, trusted and quoted by an AI.
So how does a purpose-driven organisation actually show up in AI search?
Here's where I'd focus, in rough order of priority:
Write answer-first content. Structure pages around the real questions people ask, with a clear, quotable answer in the first sentence or two — then the depth underneath. AIs lift clean, self-contained answers. Burying the point three paragraphs down means someone else's clearer page gets cited instead.
Build genuine authority and "entity" recognition. AI systems lean heavily on trust signals — who you are, what you're known for, where else you're referenced. For charities, this is a natural advantage: you have real expertise, a clear mission and, often, a recognised name. Make that legible. Consistent author bios, an authoritative About page, and mentions and links from other reputable organisations all feed the machine's sense that you're a source worth quoting.
Use the data and stories only you have. This is your unfair advantage. AI Overviews love original statistics, frontline insight and primary research — and charities sit on exactly that: service data, lived-experience stories, sector benchmarks, on-the-ground evidence no one else can publish. Original, citable material is some of the most AI-visible content you can produce. It's also the kind of work that turnss audience intelligence into an asset rather than a report that gathers dust.
Get the technical hygiene right. Clear structure, sensible headings, fast mobile pages, and structured data where it helps a machine parse what your page is actually about. None of this is glamorous, but it's how you make your content easy for an AI to read and reuse.
Earn citations beyond your own site. Digital PR, partnerships, sector commentary, being quoted in the places AIs already trust — these increasingly do for AI visibility what backlinks did for traditional SEO.
Don't abandon the fundamentals. Keep email, your supporter relationships, and your owned channels strong — the assets you control outright matter more in a situation where rented search traffic is getting squeezed. Use AI visibility as a complement to a strong digital strategy, not a replacement for one.
How do you even measure success when the click disappears?
You stop treating clicks as the only scoreboard, and you start tracking visibility and share of voice: how often your organisation is mentioned and cited across AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, not just how many people landed on your site. The next action is to monitor those mentions regularly.
A practical alert about your reporting: since June 2025, clicks from Google's AI Mode are folded into your Search Console totals under the "Web" type, but you can't separate them out. So your dashboards are already blending old and new search behaviour without telling you. Add some manual checking to the mix — actually run your most important queries through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews each month and note whether you're cited, and whether the answer about your cause and your cause area is accurate. That last point matters enormously for organisations whose reputation as well as safeguarding depend on the public getting the right information.
The opportunity hiding inside the disruption
It's easy to read all this as another thing being done to the sector. I'd flip it.
AI search rewards exactly what good purpose-driven organisations already have in abundance: real authority, a clear mission, genuine expertise and stories and data nobody else can tell. The brands that lose are the ones that were coasting on thin, generic, informational content that an AI can now reproduce in a sentence. The brands that win are the ones the AI decides are the trustworthy source on their issue.
For once, the playing field may tilt slightly towards substance over budget. That's a game charities can win — if they move now.
At Moral Media, this is exactly the shift we're helping purpose-driven organisations get ahead of through our work in SEO, AI search, and content strategy. If you're not sure how exposed your content is, or where to start, drop us a line — it's a far better conversation to have now than in twelve months' time.
