Since mid-2024, when Google and Bing added generative artificial intelligence (AI) summaries to search results, traffic from search engines has declined precipitously for most websites. Search engine optimization (SEO) consultants have closely monitored updates to their algorithms as they make the move from search engines to what Google is calling “answer engines.”
These discoveries are helping steer nonprofit and other organizations toward a new model of website content to stay relevant, and toward new "generative engine optimization" (GEO) techniques to get picked up by AI-powered search. This guide will focus on Google primarily, but the guidelines apply to most forms of traditional search engines and more recent AI services like ChatGPT and Claude.
When Google launched almost 30 years ago, its search engine results pages (SERPs) had a few key features: a list of search result links, ads, and pagination at the bottom. In the years since, Google began adding more features based on the contents of the pages it linked to, most of which appear at the top of the SERP.
Google also added featured pieces of content in 2012 for certain types of searches, such as recipes, movie times, and products. These drew from a “Knowledge Graph,” a proprietary system that didn't just index pages based on keywords but also a page’s “structured data,” or information provided by the author about the page’s contents. This code accompanies the content to tell search engines explicitly which details are most relevant.
Three years later, Google added the “People also ask” feature near the top of the page, which aggregates related questions based on your query. These drew from the contents of the pages it had crawled in an attempt to better offer answers to users rather than just a list of resources.
In the years since, Google has continued adding features to its SERPs, but the most significant recent addition is the generative AI summary. Website owners have since worked to revise their content to appear within this prime piece of search real estate, but the good news is that many of the traditional SEO strategies still remain relevant.
Google introduced in 2014 a set of quality content guidelines, initially using the acronym “EAT,” later expanded to “E-E-A-T.” These guidelines prioritize:
Whether you’re writing your “about us” page or a lengthy blog post, these guidelines are still crucial for both search rank and whether your content will be part of an AI summary. Consider them a checklist for each page and post that you’re publishing.
As a measure of those E-E-A-T guidelines, Google still prioritizes .gov and .edu addresses. Anyone can buy a .com or a .org address; .gov and .edu addresses, though, can only be purchased by government agencies and accredited institutes of higher learning, respectively, which means that the barrier of entry is higher.
Additionally, these websites are more likely to have accurate, impartial information. The Department of Health and Human Services website, for example, features information on federal housing laws straight from the source; a housing law firm’s .com website, however, may have useful information, but it is definitionally less credible than the source of the law itself.
Google set itself apart from other search engines in its early days by using the links from one website to another as a means of determining the site’s authority. If a major website links to your website, that’s a sign that your page may also be important. In other words, if the popular kids in high school are interested in you, your social rank at your school goes up.
The added value here for nonprofit organizations is that, while .org sites aren’t given the same priority as .gov and .edu sites, nonprofits are more likely to interact with those sites. If your organization offers critical services in a certain geographic or subject area, or it offers critical, original information that no one else has, this could result in “inbound links” to your site, which signal to search engines that a trusted authority considers your page authoritative and trustworthy, too.
Google also considers “time on page,” a metric that measures how long users remain on the page before navigating away, as a means of determining whether the page has quality content. In addition to writing copy that resonates with the reader, visual elements can break up long walls of text. Comparison tables, numbered and bulleted lists, embedded videos, photos and graphics, and other visually interesting materials all help increase the time users stay on the page.
Traditional SEO experts have also advocated including page subheadings within page content. As HTML, these are H2 though H6 elements; on the page, they are the phrases that break up long strings of paragraphs. From an SEO perspective, though, they are one of the more valuable pieces of real estate for the keywords you want to rank for.
Google’s May 2026 update included an announcement that the site would shift from being a search engine to an “answer engine.” More than just a conceptual change, there are actionable changes you can make to the content and structure of your nonprofit website to better optimize for this new approach.
Traditionally, SEO experts have advised publishers to consider which “keywords” — one or two primary words and phrases — that your page should optimize for. This involves strategically peppering them throughout the copy, especially in those subheadings and the page title.
This approach is still necessary, but after Google’s May 2026 update, a successful ranking strategy must be broader and consider a conversational approach.
To address this, news and other sites have begun adding bulleted summaries to the top of long pages. (You may have noticed one such section at the top of this post.) Search engines prioritize copy that appears higher in the page than lower, so the most salient information in short sentences has a better chance of getting picked up by generative summaries.
While only about 17 percent of queries in Google are phrased as actual questions, search results pages now treat every query as a question. A long-tail query like “best women's homeless overnight shelters” automatically includes your location and provides an generative AI summary as though you had asked “What are the best women’s homeless overnight shelters?”
When writing to optimize for search and generative summaries, consider: What question am I answering? Break up your page into sections with subheadings that address the question a user may search for. Keywords still play an important role here: Think about which words users may use to describe the subject, not necessarily how you describe it within your organization or sector.
You can even add an FAQ section to the bottom of your post that states direct questions and answers. For example:
Is your shelter open 24 hours?
Yes, Binghamton Housing Collective is open 24 hours a day. Our placement staff is available from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. Emergency, security, and concierge services are available 24 hours a day.
Depending on your site’s content management system, you may be able to also enable “schema,” a structured piece of data that doesn’t appear on the page but does signal to Google which are the questions and which are the answers. As a part of its June 2026 updates, Google no longer displays this FAQ data within its search results pages, except for authoritative health and government sites, but the data itself is still crucial for appearing within the generated summaries. Schema can apply to hundreds of subjects across your site beyond just FAQs, too.
Google stated in 2023 that “Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines,” but added that automation attempting to manipulate rankings still violates those guidelines.
However, the bar for quality content is now higher after the August 2025 spam update. This algorithm change means that poorly produced content can be read as spam and deprecated in search, regardless of the intent. See Google’s spam policies for more information to see if your site could be affected.
Ultimately, though, the limitation of AI-generated content is the nature of large language models (LLMs) in search. Copy generated by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other generative AI service can only draw from what has already been published. It ingests large amounts of copy and produces an algorithmically generated summary of it.
Google’s E-E-A-T search guidelines and more restrictive spam policies mean that unoriginal content lacks a competitive edge and is less likely to rank or be included in generative summaries. After all, if the search results page can already summarize the subject, your summary doesn’t add anything new for it to crawl and may contain factual errors.
One developing approach to search in an era of generative AI is to include an llms.txt file in the root directory of your website. Historically, sites include a robots.txt file that tells search engines which ones can crawl the site and which pages are off-limits, among other things. Site managers have begun adding llms.txt files to their sites in an attempt to signal similar information to generative AI services.
However, this is not a standard approach. Google’s AI optimization guide states that the engine ignores these files, but Google Chrome’s Lighthouse feature reads llms.txt for “a machine-readable summary at the root domain.” Developers will need to sort out this feature before it can be considered a necessary approach, but search marketers are often including it anyway, just in case.
There are many more search best practices for your nonprofit than we can cover in this guide, but these are some of the more significant changes lately. If you’re ready to check and revise the content of your website for improved search, these are some of the immediate next steps you should take.
The overall good news about the rise of generative AI within search is that most of the old rules still apply. The tips and tricks SEO experts share are often best for maintaining an edge in a highly competitive environment: people shopping for shoes, companies to invest in, breaking news, etc. Nonprofit organizations, though, face different needs: providing resources to community members in need and connecting with potential donors and volunteers. Write clearly with trust, authority, and reliable sources, and the rest will follow.
[Thumbnail photo: Shutterstock]