A supporter wants to do something good this month. A few years ago she would have typed “charity gala near me” into Google, scanned the blue links, and clicked through to a handful of event pages. Today she might open ChatGPT or read the AI summary at the top of her Google results and ask a fuller question: “What are some local nonprofit fundraising events happening this fall, and which ones support youth programs?”
She gets an answer. A short list, written in plain language, with a few organizations named and a sentence about each. She never scrolls. She never visits five websites. She picks from what the AI handed her.
The question every nonprofit should be asking right now is simple. When that answer gets written, is your event in it?
The data shows search habits changing
For two decades, getting found online meant ranking on the first page of Google. That was SEO, search engine optimization, and it rewarded the sites with the right keywords, fast load times, and credible inbound links.
That model is shifting. People increasingly get a synthesized answer instead of a list of links, either from Google’s AI Overviews or from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. The answer often resolves the question on the spot, so the click never happens.
The effect on nonprofit traffic is already measurable. Candid analyzed traffic across two dozen nonprofit websites and found that organic search traffic fell roughly 35% between January and October 2025 compared with the same period a year earlier, driven largely by AI Overviews and AI chat tools answering questions without sending anyone to a website (Candid).
Donor behavior is moving the same direction, just earlier in its curve. In Candid’s survey of 1,728 donors, about 4.5% said they currently use AI to find and research causes to support. That number is small today. It is also the number that tends to grow fast once a habit takes hold. AI-referred traffic made up only about 2% of total volume in that same study, but it grew roughly 1,000% year over year.
Here is the part worth sitting with. When those AI-referred visitors did land on a nonprofit site, they stayed more than 70% longer than other visitors. They arrive with intent. They have already been told you are worth a look. The catch is that the AI has to know you exist before it can send anyone your way.
This is the practice now called GEO, generative engine optimization. It is the work of making sure AI systems can find your information, understand it correctly, and repeat it accurately when someone asks a relevant question.
Why this hits fundraising and events differently
GEO matters for two distinct jobs your website does, and the stakes are different for each.
For fundraising and general awareness, the risk is being left out of the recommendation entirely. When a donor asks an AI “which organizations near me work on food insecurity,” the model assembles its answer from sources it trusts and can parse. If your mission, your impact, and your programs are written in clear, factual language that AI can read, you have a shot at being named. If your most compelling information lives inside a PDF annual report or a slideshow or an image with no text behind it, the AI cannot use it, and a peer organization becomes the default answer.
For events, the challenge is sharper because events are time-sensitive and detail-heavy. A gala, an auction, a 5K, a giving day. Each has a date, a place, a ticket price, a registration link. People are starting to ask AI tools things like “what fundraising events are happening this weekend,” and event discovery is actively moving onto these platforms. Ticketmaster, for example, has partnered with OpenAI to bring event discovery directly into ChatGPT (Ticketmaster). The commercial event world is already optimizing for this. Nonprofit events are competing for the same attention and, for now, most are not.
The good news is that events give you something concrete to optimize. An event has facts. Facts are exactly what these systems reward.
What AI systems actually reward
We have early research on what makes content more likely to be pulled into an AI-generated answer. A team from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI, and IIT Delhi tested thousands of queries and published the results at the ACM SIGKDD conference in 2024. Three tactics stood out as the most effective at increasing how often a source got cited in AI answers: adding relevant statistics, including quotations from credible sources, and citing reputable references. Together these pushed visibility up by as much as 40% across their tests (GEO: Generative Engine Optimization).
Cleaner writing helped too. Simply making content more fluent and readable raised visibility by roughly 15 to 30% in their tests. When the researchers ran the same approach on Perplexity, a live AI search tool, they saw improvements up to about 37%.
The pattern is clear enough to act on. AI favors content that is specific, factual, well structured, and easy to verify. Vague mission language and emotional copy still matter for human readers, and you should keep them. They just do little to help a machine decide you are a trustworthy source to quote.
Six things your nonprofit can do this quarter
None of this requires a rebuild. Most of it is about making information you already have legible to machines as well as people.
- Write your event pages in plain facts, high up. State the essentials in text near the top of the page: event name, date, start time, location or “virtual,” ticket or registration cost, the cause it supports, and who it benefits. Do not bury these inside a graphic or a registration widget. If a detail only appears as an image or inside a PDF, assume AI cannot read it.
- Add event schema markup. Schema is structured code that tells search engines and AI tools exactly what your page describes. For events, Google reads JSON-LD markup with properties like name, startDate, location, and offers, and uses it to surface your event in search, maps, and AI-powered experiences. One rule matters most: the schema has to match what a visitor can actually see on the page. If your website is on a platform you do not control, ask your provider or webmaster whether event schema is supported, then validate it with Google’s Rich Results Test.
- Lead with your own statistics and outcomes. “We served 12,000 meals last year” beats “we make a real difference in our community.” Specific numbers are the single most effective thing you can add, according to the GEO research, and they happen to be more persuasive to human donors too. Pull the real figures from your impact reports and put them in readable text.
- Build a clear FAQ on key pages. Question-and-answer formatting maps neatly onto how people query AI tools. A short FAQ on your event page or donation page (“Where do the proceeds go?” “Is my ticket tax-deductible?” “Where and when is the gala?”) gives these systems clean, quotable chunks of fact.
- Keep your name and details consistent everywhere. AI systems cross-check sources. If your organization’s name, address, and event dates differ across your website, your social profiles, your giving day listing, and third-party directories, you introduce doubt. Pick one canonical version of every detail and make it match across platforms.
- Tighten the writing. Short sentences. Clear headings. One idea per paragraph. The research found that readability alone lifts visibility, and it costs nothing but editing time.
A note on what not to chase
It would be easy to read all this and conclude that storytelling is dead and you should turn your website into a spreadsheet. That is the wrong lesson. Donors still give because a story moved them. The emotional case for your work is what turns a name in an AI answer into a gift, a ticket, a recurring donor.
The shift is about sequence and structure, not substance. Give the machines the facts they need to find you and represent you correctly. Give the humans the story that makes them care once they arrive. The organizations that do both will show up in the answer and convert the visit. The ones that only do the story may not show up at all.
Where to start
If you only do one thing this month, audit a single event page through this lens. Open it and ask: if an AI read only the text on this page, would it know what this event is, when it happens, where, what it costs, and who it helps? If the answer is no, fix that page first. It is the highest-value square foot of digital real estate you own right now.
The donor who never scrolls past the AI answer is not a future problem. She is already searching. The work is making sure that when she asks, your event is part of what she hears.
Greater Giving helps nonprofits run auctions, galas, and fundraising events, from online registration to mobile bidding to post-event reporting. As donor discovery shifts toward AI, the event pages and registration experiences you build are part of how these tools learn what your organization does. If you want to talk through making your next event easier to find and easier to support, we are happy to help.
Sources
- Candid, “How will AI tools affect online giving?” candid.org
- Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization,” ACM SIGKDD 2024. arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735
- Google Search Central, “Event structured data.” developers.google.com
- Ticketmaster, “AI-Powered Event Discovery With App in ChatGPT.” business.ticketmaster.com
