Nonprofit leaders everywhere are watching their website traffic plummet and wondering what comes next. The numbers tell a stark story about the digital disruption that is reshaping nonprofit communications in real time:  

• Only 8% of users click through to source sites when they encounter AI summaries in search results — a dramatic drop from the 30-40% click-through rates organizations enjoyed just two years ago. 
• A full 60% of 18-24 year olds now use generative AI for research and decision-making on a weekly basis 
• Gen AI traffic increased 3,300% year-over-year on Prime Day alone, demonstrating that AI-mediated discovery and decision-making have moved from experimental to mainstream.
• Only 1% of Gen AI users click on links they encounter within AI results. 
• Organic traffic is tanking industry-wide, with organizations reporting 18-64% drops. 

These statistics represent an existential threat to nonprofit digital engagement strategies built around organic search and website traffic. 

But some organizations are already charting a new and encouraging path forward. 

Consider the experience of Paul Bock, Director of Digital Development at Mercy Corps. Rather than simply watching his analytics decline, Bock partnered with Forum One to understand what was really happening beneath the surface. What he found (and how he responded) challenges conventional wisdom about AI’s impact on nonprofit digital strategy — and offers a roadmap for organizations willing to move beyond anxiety toward systematic action.

Mercy Corps’ AI Discoverability Journey: From Anxiety to Strategic Action

Bock’s transformation began in early 2023 during conversations with his Forum One partners about ChatGPT. What started as curiosity quickly generated what he describes as “anxious and enthusiastic energy” throughout Mercy Corps. The questions were familiar to anyone in nonprofit digital marketing: Are bots coming to our website? How do we show up in AI? What does this mean for our strategy?

In response, Bock made AI visibility a formal professional goal and began an iterative process of discovery and adaptation. Working with Forum One’s technical team, he instrumented Mercy Corps’ website to track bot activity at the server level while simultaneously implementing changes to improve their AI discoverability.

The initial data collection revealed staggering bot activity. At any given time, Mercy Corps had at least four times more bots on their website than human visitors. Between July and September 2024, they recorded over 50,000 AI bot sessions from major platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.

As Bock’s team worked to optimize their content and technical infrastructure for AI visibility, they began seeing results. While human referral traffic from AI platforms remained modest overall, ChatGPT became Mercy Corps’ second-highest referral source — a position that would have been unthinkable just a year earlier.

But the most significant discovery came from analyzing the broader traffic patterns alongside their optimization efforts. Yes, Mercy Corps experienced the industry-wide decline: in their case, a 37% drop in organic search sessions compared to the previous year. Traditional SEO wisdom would suggest this was catastrophic.

Instead, Bock found something remarkable. While overall organic search traffic fell dramatically, the remaining traffic was significantly more valuable. Conversion rates increased, and revenue from organic search traffic actually increased despite the reduced volume.

Bock calls this “good organic search traffic.” The Mercy Corps visitors who survived AI’s filtering effect were no longer casual information seekers getting quick answers and leaving. They were motivated supporters ready to engage meaningfully with Mercy Corps’ mission.

This reframe is crucial for nonprofit leaders: instead of viewing traffic decline as pure loss, organizations should analyze whether the remaining visitors are more valuable and mission-aligned than the casual browsers they’ve lost to AI summaries. 

The Strategic Framework: Three Pillars for Success in an AI-Saturated Search Landscape

Mercy Corps’ journey points to a broader strategic framework that other organizations can adapt to turn AI disruption into a competitive advantage. Success requires systematic approaches across three critical areas.

1. Communications: Content That Resonates with Humans and Machines

The shift toward AI-mediated discovery demands a fundamental reimagining of your content strategy. Organizations must create material that serves both human readers and the AI systems that increasingly filter and summarize information before it reaches audiences.

This begins with plain, direct language that clearly answers specific questions. Research shows that the top 10% of AI citations average around 1,800 words — nearly double traditional web content length. The goal isn’t simply longer content, but comprehensive answers that thoroughly address user queries without jargon or unnecessary complexity.

Structural intelligence is equally critical. Content should be organized with clear Q&A formats, logical sections, and headlines posed as questions rather than statements. This approach helps AI systems match user queries with appropriate answers while creating more scannable, accessible content for human readers.

Perhaps most importantly, authority-building must extend far beyond your website. AI systems draw from diverse sources, including Wikipedia, government websites, Reddit, established news outlets, and YouTube. Organizations need to ensure a consistent and strategic presence across these platforms, ensuring their expertise and perspective are included in the datasets shaping AI responses. This means developing Wikipedia strategies, engaging thoughtfully on Reddit, creating educational YouTube content, and coordinating with communications teams to ensure consistent messaging across earned media opportunities.

2. Technology: Infrastructure That Serves Everyone

Technical optimization for AI visibility builds on familiar web development principles while adding new layers of machine-readable information. Fast load times, clean code, and accessibility improvements benefit both human users and AI crawlers attempting to understand and categorize content.

Schema markup represents one of the most important additions organizations can make. This structured data provides invisible labels that tell crawling bots exactly what content represents — whether it’s organizational information, program details, or research findings. While human visitors never see schema markup, it dramatically improves how AI systems understand and reference the content on your site.

Forward-thinking organizations are also beginning to experiment with emerging protocols that allow direct communication with AI systems. Technologies like NLWeb and Model Context Protocol create opportunities to provide AI platforms with structured, authoritative information about organizational work and expertise.

The key is building technical infrastructure that creates better experiences for human visitors while also making content more easily processable by AI systems — a both/and approach rather than choosing sides.

3. Measurement: Beyond Vanity Metrics to Mission Impact

Perhaps the most crucial shift involves fundamentally reimagining success metrics. Traditional measurements like page views and session duration often miss the higher-quality engagement that characterizes post-AI traffic patterns.

The new measurement paradigm focuses ruthlessly on conversion rates at the channel level rather than overall traffic volume. Organizations should monitor how different traffic sources convert to email signups, donations, volunteer applications, and other meaningful actions that directly tie to the organizational mission and impact.

This includes implementing systems to track referral traffic from AI platforms and developing attribution models that account for AI-mediated discovery. As Bock discovered, understanding which donations and engagements stem from AI referrals provides crucial insights into the real value of this emerging channel.

Success also requires integrating metrics across digital platforms into comprehensive dashboards that reveal how distributed authority-building translates into organizational impact. Rather than measuring individual platform performance in isolation, organizations need unified views of how their multi-channel presence drives mission advancement.

The Experimentation Imperative

Bock’s journey illustrates a crucial principle for navigating AI disruption: knowing when to experiment versus when to rely on established tactics. For instance, when asked about incorporating AI strategies into Mercy Corps’ critical end-of-year giving campaign, Bock was refreshingly honest about the need to balance innovation with proven approaches during high-stakes moments.

This wisdom reflects a level of organizational maturity that other nonprofits should emulate. Building AI visibility is a long game that requires sustained attention and systematic approaches rather than reactive pivots.

Strategic Takeaways

For nonprofit leaders watching their organic search traffic decline and wondering what comes next, Bock’s experience offers both reassurance and a roadmap. 

• Organic search traffic isn’t returning to pre-AI levels, making adaptation essential rather than optional. Organizations must decide whether they want to be “the answer” to key questions in their domain or “inform the answer” through authoritative content that shapes AI understanding of complex issues.
• ​​Organizational commitment is essential for success. Mercy Corps’ breakthrough came only after they made AI visibility a formal goal, secured dedicated time and budget, and integrated it into the team’s performance objectives. Organizations that treat AI adaptation as a side project or afterthought will struggle to gain the systematic insights needed for strategic advantage.
• Cross-functional collaboration between digital, communications, and program teams is crucial. The organizations that can coordinate messaging across earned media, social platforms, and owned properties will build the distributed authority that AI systems recognize and cite.
• Most importantly, this transition rewards organizations willing to dig into their data, experiment thoughtfully, and focus on metrics that directly tie to mission impact rather than vanity measurements that look impressive but don’t drive meaningful change.

The ground is indeed shifting beneath traditional digital strategies, but organizations willing to embrace systematic approaches to AI visibility can find unexpected advantages in the disruption. Ready to turn AI disruption into a strategic advantage for your organization? Forum One can help you navigate this transformation while building the measurement systems and technical infrastructure needed to thrive in an AI-driven landscape.