Surviving the Search Apocalypse: How Nonprofits Can Sustain Free Website Traffic in an AI-Driven World

This presentation was for the Digital Strategy Summit and it covers:
Understand the shift in search behavior & how much organic discovery on Google is left
Understand how important social media is in the customer’s decision-making process.
Know how to engage in social media to support search.
Develop an optimization strategy for AI overviews
Know how to rank in LLM search
Learn how to future-proof your nonprofit’s organic traffic

Transcript

1. Surviving the Search Apocalypse: How Nonprofits Can Sustain Free Website Traffic in an AI-Driven World February 26, 2024
2. Katherine Watier Ong WO Strategies LLC • Built first website in 1994. • Lost sites due to too much traffic (EWG.org for 4 days, but still 1.2 million visits up from 300K) • Helped NYer’s get registered on the NY Health Exchange • Pivoted search query volume toward electronic health records for HealthIT.gov, and • Helped Cancer.gov grow from 1.5 million to nearly 5 million searches/mo.
3. Brands Katherine Watier Ong has worked with
4. Agenda • Understand the Shift in Search Behavior & how much organic discovery on Google is left • Understand the Importance of a Social Media Strategy in the decision making process • Develop an Optimization Strategy for AI Overviews • Know how to Rank in LLM Search • Future-Proof Your Nonprofit’s Organic Traffic
5. The Current Search Apocalypse
6. Almost ⅔ of the Queries Result in NO Clicks
7. 44.19% of searchers already know what they want. Of the 40% that is left….
8. Of the 40% that is left… ⅓ of the search queries are navigational
9. The Leftovers/Long Tail is *Tiny* “The Long Tail (<11 searches/month) is only 3.6% of demand. Big brands and topics are winning. Google has become a place people go *after* they discover a need rather than a demand-creation or even demand-nudging platform.” Rand Fishkin, CEO Sparktoro
10. How are the AI Overviews Impacting Search?
11. Google’s AI Overviews
12. Bing’s AI Overviews
13. AI Overviews are Increasing (and take up all of the above the fold)
14. Current Organic Search Clickthrough Rate See the full study here
15. Current AI Search Impact These are visits, not searches, but still…
16. Estimated Growth of AI Search
17. People are researching with social media, not search
18. Discovery: Only 34% start with search, 32% start with social media April 2024 data
19. Gen Z and Millennials use Social for Discovery Source Gen Z Millennials
20. Social is ranking in Search “Perspectives” First person Social profiles ranking: • Study.com • Quora.com • YouTube • Facebook
21. Every platform rewards Zero Click content
22. How much of the organic traffic can I track?
23. Organic Search Tracking Issues - People Issues • People decline cookies and remove UTMs • “Not set” are people who keep your website open in a tab. • 67% of US block cookies or the browser does (Safari, Firefox, Brave)
24. Organic Search Tracking Issues - GA4 • You can not track absolutes • Impossible to know how many users you have unless you have a login • You can’t measure the bounce rate • AI Search, many mobile visits and others are lumped into “direct” • You should be tracking percentages and sharing trends
25. What is At Stake for Nonprofits?
26. This is how many of you rely on free traffic Source
27. This is what happens if you stop/do NO SEO Will Critchlow found a company who made this decision. This is how much traffic you lose: Year 4: -13% organic traffic Year 5: -20% organic traffic Year 6: -30% organic traffic
28. This is what happens if you stop social media
29. 2025 Vital Strategy Changes
30. 1. Be where your audience is online
32. Social Media Research PRIOR to Brand Search Sparktoro to find where they are:
33. 2. Coordinate search + social
34. Social Media Ranking in Search Ahref’s SERP features:
35. Steps 1. What platforms are showing for your target keywords? 2. Create content optimized for that topic, or try to get your brand mentioned by the influencer.
36. 3. Keep your organic visitors
37. Convert the User! • Make sure you’re capturing their email or phone # • Free Microsoft Clarity to test your conversions • Google is watching your users in the Chrome browser (thank you Google algo leak and DOJ trial) - so you should too!
38. Conversion Rate Optimization Tips • Google’s UX Playbook for news and content. • Track your key events in GA4 • Install Microsoft Clarity (Free) • Use LLMs to test your UX. • Use this sheet to track your improvement ideas
39. 4. Figure out how much of your audience is using LLM Search
40. Is YOUR Audience using LLM search? • You can look by website or topic. • For “science” - not only is OpenAI in the high-affinity site list, but it’s increasing in popularity.
41. GA4 - LLM Referrals • One off exploration report -> • Create a custom channel report: ◦ Video walk-through & explanations from Kickpoint here • Looker Studio report lets you compare your LLM traffic against organic traffic.
42. 5. Create an AI Summaries Strategy
43. First: NLP? LLM? RAG?
44. Natural Language Processing (NLP) • Allows computers to understand the meaning of your queries or sentence, and/or spotting a name (entity, verb, object, subject, etc) in a chunk of text that has additional meaning. • Allows search engines to determine the salience of a chunk of text to a subject. Google started using it in 2017. • It can spot sentiment, categorize the purpose of the content. • Used in: Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Google Translate, Gmail, Google Search (BERT, MUM language models used in the algorithm) • Google uses Natural Language Generation to create text & summaries in search.
45. What are Large Language Models (LLMs)? • Large Language Models (LLMs) learn from mountains of text, nearly all of the internet (MadLibs style) to get good at next-word predictions. • With some input text (from you the user), the model is able to create a probability distribution of the most probable next set of words & randomly pick from those to come up with a confident, human-sounding response.
46. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) • It is an architecture that augments the LLM by connecting it to an information retrieval system. • Connecting LLMs to external sources of information (Google Drive, Google search) to get up to date information - Copilot today Source Google Drive & Microsoft files being uploaded into ChatGPT 4 - soon.
47. How to Rank in AI Overview
48. 1. Rank in the top 20 “Brands ranking on page 1 of Google showed a strong correlation (~0.65) with LLM mentions. Bing rankings also mattered but less so (~0.5–0.6).”
49. 2. Cosine Similarity Measure the cosine similarity between a topic and passage on any URL by using AI Overviews Visualizer. A cosine similarity of 1 means identical, and zero means not related.
50. How is this measured? 1. AI converts the word and the passage to vector embeddings. 2. Then it calculates the distance between the two vectors to determine if the keyword and topic are semantically related.
51. 3. Load Quickly, no JavaScript • The URL should load quickly and not use JavaScript to render the content. • LLM crawlers cannot render JS (except for Googlebot, Applebot & Bingbot) • Essential text should be in HTML, and server speed needs to be under 500 ms.
52. 6. Use this GPT - can you rank?
53. Create a Credible Fragment • Your fragment is credible and has citations, quotes, and stats. • The citations should increase the content's trustworthiness and relevance, and no more than 5-6 per fragment
54. 7. Make helpful content • People-First • driven by content quality. Experience, Expertise, Authority and Trust. • Demonstrate hidden gems content that show personal first-hand experience with the content.
55. Helpful Content Update - Sept 2023 • It is harder to get indexed due to content quality. • A sitewide signal, if the machine learning finds a high % of content is “unhelpful”, the site will be impacted.
56. Making Helpful Content Guide around how to provide helpful content lists questions to ask. • Quality content • Written from a palace of expertise, with author info clearly displayed (bio) • Good UX • Content created for people with a purpose that will help them with their goal. WHY are you creating the content. • Check with this custom GPT
57. Barnacle SEO Options If you are not ranking in top 20: Develop a strategy for “pitching” content to sites like Quora, Reddit, and Wikipedia that have answers ranking.
58. Bing AI Overview Optimization • Create a Bing Webmaster Tools account ◦ Check for content quality issues inside ◦ Grab and install Microsoft Clarity • Use IndexNow and Bing’s instructions • Base your content on a basic HTML template (nested H1, H2 etc) • Other Bing optimization tips
59. Create content that covers searcher’s journey Ready for when Google allows the searcher to ask the *next* question (like they did in the beta) Map your customer’s journey and create questions for the *next* question and link to it from your *first* question. (use the “People Also Searched for”, or AlsoAsked.com)
60. Measuring your Impact
61. Google Analytics 4 • Use Google Analytics (or whatever you use) to report on pages referred from Google containing #:~:text=. • This format highlights specific parts of the page in SERPs for featured snippets and AIO links.
62. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools • AI Summary visits are not segmented - instead they are rolled into the other metrics.
63. Creating a Testing and Optimization Framework
64. Building a Testing Plan • AI Overviews checklist to track your testing plan. • Measure impact on traffic (now and based on predictions) • A/B test your AI-optimized content • Measuring visibility on AI platforms
65. Developing an LLM Search Strategy
66. Create an LLM Ranking Plan It’s not about “position” It’s about getting included in answers, summaries, and conversations
67. How Ranking works in an LLM Your brand mentioned in the LLM’s training data next topics associated with your brand. Key ranking factors include: • Allow LLM crawling • Content Quality and Authority • Contextual Relevance - Match to Search Intent • Concise, Structured Responses • Internal Linking and Semantic Relationships (Topical Authority)
68. How to Structure Content to Rank in an LLM 1. Featured Snippet-Style Responses 2. Hierarchical Content Structure 3. FAQs Section 4. Semantic Optimization Add related keywords, entities, and topics SEObility.net
69. Leveraging Topic Clustering Why topic clusters matter: • AI assesses how well your site covers a broad topic comprehensively. • You can cluster pages around key missions or causes (e.g., climate change, hunger relief). Google algo leak & topical authority
70. Create Strategic Internal Links • Guide AI bots to related content to signal authority. • Link posts, case studies, donation pages, and resources around the same topic. • AI Prompt (for a chat with RAG): Provide a list of semantically-related URLs from [domain] that are related to [provide URL] in a table format. The final output should be a list of URLs taken using only from [domain].
71. Conversational Keyword Optimization for AI 1. Question-Based Keywords 2. Long-Tail, Intent-Focused Keywords Natural, full-length phrases that align with search intent 3. Semantic Keywords Integrate synonyms, related phrases, and entities
72. Building Content that AI Recommends • Create evergreen content that addresses common topics. • Optimize for context-based triggers, such as stories of impact, donor success stories, or how-tos. • Maintain a consistent content refresh strategy to signal relevance. • Leverage Videos, PDFs, etc.
73. The Role of Backlinks and Mentions in LLM Ranking Authority through mentions and citations plays a significant role. • Publish high-value resources (reports, studies) that others will reference and link to. • Ensure citations in industry databases, research hubs, or news outlets. • Collaborate with partners for mentions.
74. Sites to Target 1. Database-style websites 2. Large editorial sites 3. Sources for the Google Knowledge Graph 4. Or you can prompt the AI chat to surface sites that make the most sense for your topic.
75. AI-Specific Technical Optimization Limited JavaScript • Except for Google, LLMs are not rendering JavaScript. Page Load Speed: • AI models penalize slow-loading sites during ranking selection. • Many have tight timeouts (1-5 seconds). Long content might be truncated after the timeout. AI-Crawling Considerations: • Optimize (don’t block in) robots.txt, XML sitemaps and interlinking for better AI bot discovery of new content.
76. AI Search Engine Test - will you appear? https://andisearch.com/
77. Your new Robots.txt # Allow AI search and agent use User-agent: OAI-SearchBot User-agent: ChatGPT-User User-agent: PerplexityBot User-agent: FirecrawlAgent User-agent: AndiBot User-agent: ExaBot User-agent: PhindBot User-agent: YouBot Allow: / # Disallow AI training data collection User-agent: GPTBot User-agent: CCBot User-agent: Google-Extended Disallow: / # Allow traditional search indexing User-agent: Googlebot User-agent: Bingbot Allow: / # Disallow access to admin areas for all bots User-agent: * Disallow: /admin/ Disallow: /internal/ Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml For an updated list of AI agents, check Dark Visitors.
78. Brand Optimization • Claim your Knowledge Panel and update it • If not panel, put in place sameas markup on your about page and link to your other off site mentions • Manage your Wikidata and Wikipedia mentions • Interlink your onsite entities in a semantic way.
79. Your brand + the LLM You need to check your brand entities across all of the LLM chats. Prompts to try: • What is X brand known for? • What topics is [brand] authoritative on? • What brand is high authority in the [topic] or [service]? • Who is known for X topic targeted at X people? A more elaborate process to find the questions that people ask that are associated with your brand.
80. Analyze the Results and Look at Competitors • Competitors Appearance ◦ How are they are mentioned and what URLs? ◦ Can you be mentioned there for those topics? • How well does the LLM understand your brand?
81. Not all LLMs are the same - some have RAG Generative AI Platforms LLM Knowledge Cut-off Date ChatGPT ChatGPT-4o October 2023 ChatGPT-4 April 2023 Gemini Gemini Pro Nov 2023 Perplexity AI Perplexity April 2023 Claude Claude 3 April 2024
82. Strategy for LLM without Rag & no brand mentions 1. Place your brand (or website) with your target keywords/topics on authoritative sites. 2. Provide the LLM feedback on its responses (including thumbs up and thumbs down) 3. You will have to wait until they update their training dataset to update that LLM’s information about your brand.
83. LLM with RAG and Brand Mention Goal: Inject Information into the training set Training Data Sources that we know about: YouTube (subtitles)
84. Steps to an LLM Ranking Strategy 1. Find where the LLM search is missing information about your brand. 2. Add that information to a URL that is used by ChatGPT for citations. 3. Include reviews from real users and quote experts in your copy. 4. Easy to understand writing that uses simple language. 5. Format into lists for key aspects of the topic you are covering
85. Steps to an LLM ranking strategy 6. Increase the number of semantically related words. 7. Summarize your user-generated content. 8. Wait for re-indexing and monitor improvements. 9. Keep testing. 10. Keep doing classic SEO since AI Chatbots still lean heavily on their results to ground answers.
86. An SEO’s Chat with LLM for Ranking Ideas • Offer Unique, Proprietary Insights • Specialize in Niche Queries: • Build Interactive Tools • Influencers or Community Partnerships • Multimedia Content • Case Studies and Stories • Deep and Evergreen Content • Build a Recognizable Brand • Get Content Syndicated to get more mentions • Use AI APIs and ask AI. • Create Content within the AI Chat (Custom Branded GPTs) • Partner with LLMs Source
87. Measuring your mentions in LLM search
88. GA4 - LLM Referrals • One off exploration report -> • Create a custom channel report: ◦ Video walk-through & explanations from Kickpoint here • Looker Studio report lets you compare your LLM traffic against organic traffic
89. Measure LLM Rankings • Knowatoa • OtterlyAI • BrandRank.ai • SpyGPT • RankScale.ai • Profound (enterprise)
90. Organization Adaptability • Join masterminds • Share updates via brown bag sessions • Take advantage of free AI training
91. AI Chat caveats for your use of AI
92. Hallucinations • Making stuff up = “hallucinations.” • 3-27% of the time it’s hallucinating. • Treat AI like you would a new-to-you intern and check every step, and you should be OK. • You can ask your AI: ◦ Do you understand? ◦ Please provide references. ◦ If you don’t know, say you don’t know Image generated by Microsoft Designer
93. Mirrors Your Intelligence • ChatGPT mirrors your intelligence and education level • You must train AI to write for your target audience’s reading level. Image created by Microsoft Designer
94. Proprietary and PII Information If you answer yes, Don’t use the data in AI chat • Is the information confidential by your business? • Is the information you are using not freely available on the Internet? • Are you using personal information? • Is it financial information? • It is login details? • Is it something that is secret?
96. Bribing/Tipping Improves Response
97. Human Review is still needed • Ideally, AI should only be used to partially generate content — a human’s expertise is still needed. • Review the outputs — ◦ The answer ◦ The references ◦ The logic
98. Employee policies for AI chat use?
99. Other recommended AI use cases
100. Brand Promise, Positioning & Voice ◦ Brand promise - the high-level promise we make to our customers, developers and partners. It’s the reason our brand exists. ◦ Brand positioning - our clear-cut stake in the ground. It’s the space we want to occupy in people’s minds. ◦ Personality/Voice - assigning human characteristics and personality traits to bring a brand to life. 100 To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. For serious athletes, Nike gives confidence that provides the perfect shoe for every sport. Rugged. Exciting. Cool. Innovative.
101. Using AI to codify your brand voice? • Unique Brand Value (UBV) Helps cement brand + topic. • Increase brand mentions & searches. • Google measures your brand searches and uses it in rankings. Lower brand value sites are not able to appear for various search features. • Consistency in your customer’s experience regardless of the touchpoint. • Your employees and customers can articulate and effectively share with others.
102. Additional Resources
103. Other Resources Our guide on how to rank for AI Overviews Creating a social media strategy that supports Google discovery. This custom GPT: Can it rank for an AI Overview? CoPilot prompt toolkit
104. Bonus Items • Keyword Content Mapping Sheet • SEO Writing Guide/Content Brief per main topic • SEO Writing Checklist • Searcher’s Intent tutorial and checklist • Featured Snippets writing guide and checklist • Image Optimization Checklist • Fraggles Writing Checklist • Guide for improving CTR • Optimizing the SERP Snippet Generated with Gemini Advanced
105. A SEO writer’s checklist • Does this match intent (content type, format & copy)? • If an AI Overview appears, does your passage match the topic? • Have I explained why my content matters to the topic? • Did I back my claims up? • Is every sentence adding value? • Have I given a next step? • Did I review the copy based on EEAT? • Am I encouraging the click from search?
106. KATHERINE WATIER ONG 202-930-1744 katherine@wostrategies.com www.linkedin.com/in/katherinewatier www.WOStrategies.com Daily SEO tips via Alexa