Recently, as I’ve continued to check the traffic to our nonprofit client’s websites, I’ve noticed a distinct pattern. Organic search traffic is no longer reaching the numbers it did in years past. Across organizations in various sectors of the nonprofit industry, with differing website sizes and objectives, this pattern appears to persist. And there are new traffic sources popping up, too: ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. As a Digital Strategist, I’ve watched as the website landscape has continued to change and evolve drastically as AI has become further integrated into our lives and our search habits. A key part of website success since the dawn of the internet has revolved around organic search. But whether nonprofits can continue to rely on organic search is another question.
For many nonprofits, your website is your single largest touchpoint with those you serve and work with. Whether your website aims to introduce potential donors and clients to your work, reconnect with existing partners and share successes, collect donations, or another key function, its success is vital to advancing your mission.
Organic search brings people right to your website from their search queries, introducing your organization to first-time visitors and making it easy for returning users to come back. Google has long held a near-monopoly status over organic search traffic. However, with several significant changes to Google’s search engine over the past few months and years, for many nonprofits, organic search traffic is now offering diminishing returns.
We’ve seen a number of our clients’ websites attracting fewer users, page views, and clicks from organic search, to no fault of their own. Search engine optimization is a larger and more challenging topic than ever before, and additions to Google search engines, such as SERP features (search engine results page features), are changing users’ habits in real time. The recent global expansion of Google AI overviews is especially changing the landscape of search in new and meaningful ways.
This begs the question: how can we adapt and strengthen our website traffic when we can no longer rely solely on Google? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t quick or straightforward. However, there are several ways we can use this opportunity to strengthen outbound tactics that enhance our website traffic, increase our visibility among broader audiences, and refine our organization’s marketing strategy. First, let’s talk a bit more about what’s currently happening with organic search.
What’s the Current State of Organic Search?
The organic search landscape is changing, as is our technology landscape as a whole. And organic search engines are just one part of the tech landscape that’s been largely shaken up by AI. Even if you’re far from being an SEO expert, you’ll be familiar with what I’m referencing. When you search on Google, you’ll no longer see the top results displayed simply as web pages to click on to find an answer. Instead, a Google AI overview now often pops up as the first result, offering you an answer right there—no click necessary. Semrush has reported that AI overviews are on the rise, with 13.4% of all queries triggering overviews in an extensive study they conducted in March 2025. While the AI overviews are often still far from accurate (and Google has suggested that they aren’t intended to reduce website traffic), many website owners have been tracking their organic search losses back to this feature, in addition to others.
The jury’s still out on the degree of the effect that AI overviews have had on website clicks over recent months. Some small studies have aimed to demonstrate the impact, with one study from Ahrefs asserting that clicks have been reduced by up to 34.5% for informational keywords, which trigger the most AI overviews. And now that Google continues to expand overviews into new regions of the globe and new languages, and Google is introducing a separate entirely AI search experience, there’s no question that the typical search experience will continue to change.
User behavior patterns are changing, too. More users have begun to incorporate LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini into their toolbelt for answering their queries. It’s unclear whether these behavioral changes will result in any meaningful market share loss for Google. Still, the development is noteworthy as website managers begin to ask not only how they can gain visibility in Google, but also how to utilize these AI tools.
The effects of these changes are both felt and seen on many nonprofit websites. While the current moment is a necessary time to consider pivoting away from a heavy reliance on organic search, it could also be an interesting opportunity to reassess how our website appears to our audiences and rethink our ideas of success.
How Can You Reduce Your Website’s Reliance on Organic Search?
Build an Outbound Strategy
We often refer to simple reliance on organic search traffic as an “inbound-only” approach to website traffic. But with Google’s diminishing returns and the ever-increasing uncertainty of this moment in time for nonprofits, it’s unwise to lean just on inbounds. Instead, we can invest and build our outbound strategies to find where our users are—and bring them right to us.
Learn Where to Actually Find Your Audience
For many organizations, you may currently have only a rough idea of how audience members are finding you and your website. Starting with this research is crucial, so you don’t end up investing a significant amount of time and resources into building digital channels in online spaces where your audience doesn’t typically congregate. There are a number of ways that you can consider conducting this audience research, such as:
- Intake forms: If your website includes a sign-up or log-in feature, include a field on the sign-up form that asks visitors to confirm how they found you (e.g., search, social, from a colleague, etc.). Alternatively, if you have a newsletter, you can include this question in your email subscription form.
- Questionnaires: Add a small live survey to your website’s homepage using a tool like Crazyegg to ask similar questions.
- Audience interviews: Conduct more comprehensive user research by interviewing audience members to discover how they found you and what keeps them coming back.
By doing this research, you’ll learn more about your website visitors, understand if they align with the audience you’re trying to reach, and discover why they’re visiting in the first place. And you will know where your users are, so you can build channels that meet them there.
Invest in High-Return Digital (and Even Offline) Channels
Next, you will need to invest necessary time and resources into the digital channels that you have identified through research efforts as the most impactful for our organization. These channels may include:
- Social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok. These are especially beneficial if your audience tends to be younger or if your work is more visual.
- Newsletters and content hubs that allow you to share updates, insights, and resources regularly.
- Online forums and communities where your audience is already active, such as Reddit, Slack, Discord, or closed LinkedIn groups.
- Direct outreach and partnerships to individuals or organizations that could benefit from what you have to offer.
Whatever channel you’ve identified as the most valuable for your organization and how you define website success, invest in it. Likely, the quality of the individuals you bring back to your website from these dedicated activities will be even better than those Google sends your way, meaning stronger connections with audience members and a higher likelihood that they will engage and continue to engage with you. It’s worth cautioning that both doing this business development and marketing work isn’t easy, and it’s not easy to do well. But it’s perfectly alright to test and iterate.
It will likely take a few attempts to identify the channels and marketing strategies that your organization should prioritize, and these channels and strategies should evolve over time. Even though this work takes ongoing time and effort, I don’t think we as social impact organizations have a choice to not do this work anymore. The more our organizations can stand on their own two feet without relying on Google, the less thrash we’ll see as Google and search behavior continues to change.
Prioritize People, Not Just Crawlers
It’s important to remember through all of this work that at the crux of building this outbound website strategy is designing for real humans, not search engines or web crawlers. It can become easy, especially when trying to rank higher in search results, to end up with a website or outbound marketing content that feels like it’s built for a machine to digest, rather than a human. And the internet is completely rife with this kind of content (not to speak of content that is fully AI-driven and almost incomprehensible). As we see a rise of low-quality content, it will become increasingly more important to create meaningful, people-centered experiences. This means:
- Writing for clarity, comprehension, and connection (and not just keyword density).
- Showcasing authentic voices, stories, and proof of impact (and not just jargon or filler).
- Prioritizing accessible and inclusive language to welcome all audiences.
In some cases, the best “channel” to reach your audience might not even be digital! No matter what the why is for why people need to come to your website, or where they come from, people want to feel that their time is respected and valued. If Google’s shifting search landscape prompts us to reconnect with our audiences in more human, intentional ways, perhaps this is a positive outcome overall.
Final Thoughts
We’re in a very uncertain moment for social impact organizations more generally. Especially for those who collect donations from their website, and those who have experienced recent funding losses, websites are key lifelines in how our space operates. With all of these shake-ups, it seems like decreasing organic search traffic is just one of many challenges right now. However, it can be tackled with a great deal of intention, focus, and effort. Reducing your organization’s reliance on Google is one opportunity to take matters into your own hands and ensure that there’s one less piece of uncertainty to contend with.
If you’d like to learn more about how we develop dedicated websites and marketing strategies for our clients, please get in touch!
