Your website represents many things. For some nonprofits, it’s a place where your communities can gather. For others, it may be a main driver of donations or a knowledge hub that stores the wealth of information you develop and share. But for all nonprofits (and for-profit companies too), your website is also arguably your most important brand experience.
What exactly makes a website a “brand experience”? The decisions you make to build your website visually and functionally may not always feel like brand decisions, but they are (or should be). Every website choice should extend from brand, creating a web-based “brand experience” that your audiences will ultimately remember you by. A nonprofit that aims to emphasize its people-centered approach in its brand strategy should elevate testimonials, people-focused photography, and accessible language throughout its website. A nonprofit looking to differentiate its brand as a thought leader in its space should have a robust resource center with advanced filtering and functionality. If you’re a data-driven organization, your website should feature data visualizations. I could go on, but you get the point.
The importance of this approach has long been understood by organizations, especially nonprofits, who want their online presence to match the intention, values, and often also the vibrancy of who they are and why they exist. But with recent developments in AI-powered search and general uncertainty about what the future of the search and website landscape will look like, it’s easy to get caught up in a sea of distracting recommendations on where to place your resources. I hope to reinforce why, even in the age of AI, brands will reign supreme.
What is AI Doing to Search and Websites?
In August 2025, an article appeared in New York Magazine titled “SEO is Dead. Say Hello to GEO,” with GEO being a new and slightly flashy acronym for “generative engine optimization.” This article was just one of the many news articles, opinion pieces, forum posts, and webinars that have emerged over the past two years proclaiming that search will never be the same (many with similar titles claiming SEO is dead). LLMs like ChatGPT have skyrocketed to success, changing user search habits and forcing giants like Google to pivot. Google has tried to keep up, mostly through expanding its AI overviews and eventually launching a full AI search mode. Google has arguably even fallen behind Bing, whose early partnerships have turned into the now Copilot search experience in Bing.
The questions our clients have begun asking me, as our team’s SEO expert, have also changed. No longer do marketing and digital teams want to know how to rank in Google; they want to know how to rank in ChatGPT. What are the AI crawlers looking for on their website? Is it even worth it to pick keywords and fill out SEO metadata in the Yoast SEO plugin anymore? Should they change their content strategy, their marketing strategy, or their business development strategy to adapt?
One of the most recent and worrying developments is a patent that Google filed and was recently granted, which could replace website landing pages with personalized AI-generated landing pages. In a Forbes article responding to the patent’s acceptance, the author even went as far as to say:
“Your job is no longer to build a destination. It’s to build a parts library. And one that’s well documented so that when an AI agent reassembles those parts for the human on the other side, the parts are put together in a way you wish to be represented.”
To reel us in, just because this patent was granted does not mean Google will move forward with it. There’s no need to panic now, but there’s good reason to stay updated and start building a more future-proof approach to your online visibility. This is where brand still applies.
Why Should You Focus on Brand Right Now?
But how does your brand apply? Well, currently, your brand plays a big part in surfacing your content across AI-driven search tools. And, in my opinion, the real people who also appreciate a brand experience still matter, too. Your brand just might be powerful enough to bridge this gap between building for large language models and building for humans.
Appeasing AI: Brand Mentions and Recognition
At their simplest, large language models like ChatGPT train on massive datasets, using neural networks to understand relationships among content so they can return answers most likely to be useful to a user. Part of understanding what will be most helpful to a user involves examining how often a brand is mentioned in its training data set. This means the more brand mentions your organization has across the internet, the more likely your content is to be included in a ChatGPT response. This SEO principle has always existed, but in a slightly different form: website backlinks.
Similarly, traditional search engines have used backlinks for years to establish a website’s relevance and the context of other websites and content it exists within, in order to organize and rank results. Brand mentions and backlinks are, at their core, very similar, but now the actual links matter less, and the brand name matters more. If anything, this is the time for your organization to increase investment in marketing activities that boost your brand recognition and relevance online. And all of these efforts must start with a strong, well-branded website.
Another interesting phenomenon is query rewriting. LLMs will often rewrite user queries to make data retrieval easier or to provide more personalized results. In a study completed by Trakkr.ai, an AI visibility tool, they discovered what they deemed “phantom competitors.” The study goes on to explain:
When you ask, “What’s the best email marketing tool?” AI doesn’t just find answers — it inserts brand names you never mentioned. Your search for “email marketing software” becomes “Mailchimp vs. Klaviyo email marketing comparison.”
This happens in over 1 in 10 queries. AI’s training on comparison content leads it to assume brand-specific searches — even when you ask a generic question. To repeat, in over 1 in 10 sampled queries, the AI tool determined and added brand names, yielding results from the chosen brands without the user’s knowledge. If this is going to take place, you want to try to secure your brand’s spot as a phantom competitor itself.
These are only some of the ways your brand helps determine whether you show up in generative search engines, but together they drive home that this is not a time to de-emphasize or ignore brand. And if we’re lucky, the resources we dedicate to marketing and branding can yield positive results for the humans we serve as well.
Appeasing Real People: Brand Expression and Authenticity
I am a real believer that we must still build our websites for humans. It’s true that in order to reach those humans, we must now contend with ChatGPT’s crawlers and result choices. But at the end of the day, we are hoping those results end up in the hands of real humans. This is yet another reason why brands may be more important now than ever.
In a world where organizations at large are leveraging AI-generated content and AI-powered chatbots, among other AI-driven experiences on their websites, your humanity can set you apart. I, for one, am experiencing real fatigue reading AI-generated results and content. I am becoming tired of trying to assess if what I’m reading was written by and meant for a real human. And I’m not the only one.
As I stated in the opening of this article, your organization’s website is arguably your most important brand experience. It’s a place where your stakeholders go to explore your information and understand your organization’s unique perspective and value. As everything else on the internet begins to flatten as it’s run through LLMs, your website will only become more distinctive if it continues to feature human-oriented content, an intuitive user experience, and a striking visual design. And this rings even more true for impact-driven organizations. Nonprofits are held to a higher standard when it comes to expressing their brand’s vision, mission, and how they show up in the world authentically.
If we return to Google’s scary patent, it only drives home the importance of brand expression on your website. As the article’s author said, in a future where Google is generating AI landing pages from your website, you need to build your website so that “when an AI agent reassembles those parts for the human on the other side, the parts are put together in a way you wish to be represented.”
This suggests that now more than ever, it’s important for every single module on your website to be highly branded and uniform, so any newly created iteration of your information remains both unique to your organization and consistent with your brand strategy. Your intention as you build your website will have to be even stronger as you lose more and more control over how end users experience it. You’re still trying to reach that human on the other side.
So, What Should You Do?
As is clear, the search landscape is still changing. It now feels like not even days or weeks can go by without new or updated products, and a slew of experts sending mixed messages about how your organization should react. This remains difficult to parse, but one thing is for sure: it’s time to take your brand seriously.
For some nonprofits that already have a strong brand, this may mean increasing marketing efforts across the internet to increase brand mentions and recognition. For other nonprofits, it may be time to reassess your brand strategy and how your website expresses it, to strengthen your presence at a time when it’s crucial. If this is your case, contact us to discuss what this could look like.
Even in the age of AI, who you are and why you exist still matter. So, let your brand bridge the gap between AI and humans.
