Why Nonprofits Are Losing Ground in the AI Search Era

Today, consumer search behaviour and search engines no longer perform the way they did a few years ago. Much like other paradigm shifts in the digital era, AI appears to be the driving force behind this transformation as well, underpinning the first-ever trillion-dollar marketing spend in 2026.

AI-generated summaries, chatbots, LLM search tools, and zero-click experiences are reshaping how organizations are discovered online, often before a user even visits a website. With nonprofits already competing for limited attention, this shift can carry significant consequences.

Research predicts that 24% of search engine volume will disappear by the end of 2026, as nearly 45% of consumers today rely on AI assistance and generative search experiences. Between June 2024 and September 2025, organic click-through rates fell by 61% due to AI overviews, which could change how information is surfaced and which organizations receive visibility.

Nonprofits that once relied on organic traffic now face a more fragmented discovery environment where recognition matters as much as rankings. Rebekah Walker, Managing Director of Fifty and Fifty, a growth strategy and marketing agency working largely with nonprofits and social enterprises, frames this shift accurately. “The difference is really between owned media and earned media. We can keep our website up to date, and for years, that was enough,” she says. “But the switch to AI and algorithms has put a greater emphasis on earned media and developing authority in that way.”

She believes organizations are grappling with what visibility means in an AI-powered search environment. Nonprofits, she notes, face a broader challenge due to limited marketing resources and increasing competition for attention. In that landscape, Walker acknowledges that digital authority is just as important, if not more, than content production itself.

She says. “If that’s something you haven’t been focused on over the last few years, you don’t have those mentions out there, and you don’t have that foundation to build on.”

AI systems, Walker explains, aren’t merely indexing pages anymore. She frames them as engines synthesizing authority, drawing from earned media mentions, third-party citations, expert commentary, and the broader web of credibility signals that tell an intelligence system whether an organization is worth referencing. SEO and keywords matter, she adds, but they may not be sufficient on their own.

Javan Van Gronigen, Founder and Creative Director at Fifty and Fifty and Donately, believes that many nonprofits were already underinvested in long-term strategy before generative AI accelerated the disruption. He says, “Many organizations were already behind when it came to content strategy. Now, the goalpost has moved again, and they may be falling even further behind.”

He even points to the compounding technical debt, where organizations may have little to no schema markup or digital footprint on third-party credible platforms, which adds to the growing complexity of search visibility. “A few years ago, you could look at the search engine rankings and understand where you stood,” Van Gronigen says. “Now, with fragmented visibility, organizations are scrambling to measure their visibility, citations, and click-through rates.”

According to Walker, limited budgets create another obstacle. Large commercial brands can absorb rapid platform shifts through dedicated SEO teams and paid media campaigns. Smaller nonprofits, on the other hand, often work with lean communications departments where marketing responsibilities are distributed across fundraising and outreach staff.

Through Fifty and Fifty’s work with nonprofit organizations, the company has observed a growing divide between organizations that merely publish content and those that actively establish trust signals across the web. The latter, Van Gronigen notes, are increasingly better positioned to be surfaced by search engines and AI-powered discovery platforms.

In Walker’s view, authority signals now extend to expert commentary, press coverage, industry recognition, and reputation consistency, all of which contribute to how AI systems interpret organizational legitimacy.

Credibility, she posits, has effectively become a discoverability factor.

Van Gronigen believes the trust dimension makes the stakes particularly high. He says, “The nonprofit world has lost a lot of trust recently. Content needs to be consistent, and organizations need to be communicating who they are correctly. Now more than ever, you don’t control the narrative. The bots are reading your content and deciding for you what gets put out into the world.”

A common mistake Walker and Van Gronigen observe is a failure of coherence in marketing efforts. He points to the increase in tactical decisions without a unified strategy, calling it “random acts of marketing,” where organizations publish content without connecting it to a broader authority-building framework. “They’re confusing activity with momentum, but effort alone doesn’t create visibility. The biggest mistake is not thinking of it all in that larger ecosystem,” He explains.

The corrective, according to him, is a genuinely holistic approach, one that subordinates content production to a clear organizational point of view, aligning messaging, technology, analytics, and reputation-building efforts. In his view, that becomes an effective way to build consistent authority across trusted platforms over time.

At Fifty and Fifty, this methodology informs the agency’s “Engagement OS” framework, which evaluates organizations comprehensively. The process audits messaging, branding, technical infrastructure, donor journeys, communications systems, and search visibility to identify the gaps preventing long-term growth, prioritizing the work into the roadmap.

“Hope is not a plan,” he says. “Organizations need systems that help them understand what’s actually creating value and what’s just activity.”

AI itself is not the enemy of nonprofit visibility. Walker and Van Gronigen both argue that the organizations willing to adapt early may ultimately gain an advantage, even against larger competitors. According to them, generative search systems increasingly reward recognizable expertise and authentic authority, which could create opportunities for mission-driven organizations demonstrating meaningful impact.

“The organizations that will stand out are the ones doing real work and creating measurable impact,” he remarks. “The digital authority follows the substance.”