Getting AI to value your online offering
Has your charity found its “other audience” yet? The AI system that is steering humans to engage with your message, read your stories, sign up to your cause and build an allegiance with you as a charity? What you say about yourself, what journalists and supporters say about you across the web, now all of it has to add up to something consistent and credible in both places.
For AI to bring up your charity in an answer to a question (e.g. “which is the best conservation charity to work with?”), your charity has to meet certain criteria. LLMs (Large Language Models) crawl the web looking for information to answer questions posed to the AI, and making sure you have the answers puts you in pole position for the AI to pick you up.
Research shows an incredible 125% increase in LLM traffic in 2025, and analysts predict that not only will traditional search engine volume drop 25% by 2026, but that by 2028, organic searches will decrease by over 50% or more as more visitors use AI-powered searches.
Visibility to AI and earned trust work together to influence discovery, demand, and decision making. If we are going to prepare ourselves not only to trust AI but to maximise its effectiveness in our fundraising and marketing endeavours, we need to understand how it trusts us.
Gaining the trust of AI
Clarity is lacking for many charities around AI. There’s a sense of urgency about wanting to deploy it but a lack of understanding about how and where. Ensuring that it’s on your side, recognising and rating you, and therefore wanting to funnel people in your direction should be one of your top priorities.
LLMs are your new audience, and they’re a different audience altogether. They are evaluating your charity constantly and consistently, based on whether your content is open, structured, consistent and corroborated elsewhere. The site you painstakingly created to attract a human user to donate or fundraise actively works against you in an AI-discovery world.
So, how can you change this, and where should you start?
Begin with good social media engagement. Answer promptly, be appreciative of positive comments, be interested in those commenting, make the engagement personal rather than generic wherever possible and be helpful where you can. Give pointers to further (trusted) information and aim for a warm but authoritative voice, especially on community sites.
Monitor your “reviews”, i.e. the feedback on the experiences people have had fundraising for you or benefiting from your work.
Write clearly, using subheadings that involve specific questions, for example “what is your helpline number?” instead of the more vague “contact us”. Short paragraphs with simple lists ideally in bullet point form is very much appreciated by AI as it eases the task of extracting information.
If you’re giving advice or information based on your expertise, then make sure this information includes the way in which this information has been created or reviewed with named authors and their credentials, dates or expert sign-off. This lets the LLM know that you are a credible source of information to whom it can refer users with confidence.
In addition, change your mindset and try to think like an LLM. If your website doesn’t have one, create an FAQ page as LLMs rate them as hugely valuable. In addition, LLMs crawl transcripts, not videos, so make it easy for them. In fact YouTube is currently the primary source for ChatGPT currently so video transcripts (which convert the spoken word into text) tick both the accessibility and the LLM-appeal boxes. Use tactics that welcome AI, like opening up gated content and challenging poor formatting that is difficult to crawl.
And finally, a positive news profile. PR is one of the industries that is actually being boosted by AI as the more news stories the AI can find about you, the better – these are counted as ‘authority references’ that make it clear you are real, current and engaged.
The key is community rather than broadcasting. Charities with genuine community presence don’t yell about themselves, they initiate or join a conversation on a community site and act appropriately, fitting in with the vibe of that site. This all adds to a charity’s credibility as far as the LLM is concerned.
Once the AI “trusts” you as a reputable body, it will put you forward in answer to prompts. Once you have those elements in place you will be seen as a trusted source by the AI, which will then boost your marketing by making you visible in AI searches.
Building the trust in AI
Your employees and volunteers in their turn then have to trust the AI to represent your charity in the correct manner. Misinformation about AI is rife, from a sinister conviction that it will completely replace human intervention to a belief that it has its own values that may clash with the charity’s own. A simple briefing and an encouragement to engage with AI should overcome any wariness. Reassure employees and volunteers that there will always be a “human in the loop”.
Don’t assume that your staff or volunteers are familiar with using AI and similarly don’t make its use compulsory. Just as the AI doesn’t trust your charity automatically, your volunteers won’t trust in its value automatically either.
Human consensus from real humans matters to humans, and happily it also matters far more to LLMs than search terms.
The role of AEO
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the new buzz abbreviation but like many hot topics it’s worth assessing if it’s something which is actually going to be useful for your charity and this assessment involves various questions. You need to gauge what percentage of your audience is genuinely starting its engagement with you on ChatGPT or other AI platforms – is that where your particular audience really is? Don’t be drawn in by the hype, do your research.
Then there is the all-important budgetary issue. Bearing in mind Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) feeds AEO, don’t ditch your SEO budget in favour of AEO as they need to run in tandem. If you are thinking of reallocating your budget from paid Google advertising, for example, to an investment in AEO, ask yourself what your aim is. Cause awareness? Traffic clicks? Start small and measure, then adjust.
Planning to build trust
Winning the trust of AI takes a community, consensus, understanding and time. If you help your charity appear like a person with values, respect and interest, the AI will want to get to know it, just like another person would.
Get yourself talked about – third party validations, reviews, endorsements, press, listings, forums, communities. Be part of it and engage in a friendly, professional and knowledgeable manner to build a sense of your charity as an authentic presence which can be trusted. Working on these three strands at once – content, community, communication – creates a foundation of trust and credibility that will make AI think your charity is worth the search.
The next step
So now we have established that your charity’s website probably needs to change fairly radically to gain the trust and the attention of the LLMs, this leads us to the all-important question – who in your charity has the authority and the tools to change the structure of your web experience quickly enough to make a difference?
The charities which are winning with AI visibility are not necessarily those with the biggest pockets and the largest developer or content teams, churning out acres of copy on a daily basis, but the ones which are working with a system that can be quickly and safely updated to give their charity’s site the best shot at being noticed.
