Better believe there’s no shortage of forecasts about AI website optimization… what’s coming, when’s the blizzard arriving and the drought and the winds and those raining frog phenomena’s. Sadly it’s different for everyone on whether you should plan for a picnic or start sand-bagging for the storm.
Over the past year, we’ve been exploring one small part of this confounding ‘weather’ forecasting: how AI-driven search is changing what a nonprofit website needs to do well.
… do you need to stock up on SP40 sunscreen or raincoats? That’s the kicker right there. Sun AND rain brings life and flourishing but too much of one brings destruction. The dangers of websites, they can often become “too much”.
Start With Clarity
openbox9 can’t change the weather, but we can see patterns and it has become increasingly clear: preparing your website for AI is less about optimizing for AI and more about making your organization unmistakably clear.
Traditional SEO has focused heavily on helping search engines find and rank individual pages (and that still matters). But AI tools are also trying to understand the bigger picture:
- Who are you?
- What do you do?
- Who do you serve?
- What expertise do you have?
- And what evidence supports it?
This means, taking a harder look at your website. Is outdated or contradictory content muddying the picture? Do your programs, expertise, projects and impact clearly connect? Is important information buried in PDFs or presented without enough context? Help that lil’ AI bot confidently understand what makes your organization relevant.
Think of these as the data points in your own forecast. You can’t predict exactly where AI search is headed, but you can prepare for changing conditions.
Nothing New Here
My favorite part of this advice is how those unhuggable robots want to know the same things as your potential donors and supporters. This work is no different than that of 1999.
We’ve been testing these questions with our clients and on openbox9’s own website (including reworking our case studies to better connect what we do with actual examples and outcomes). We found it very familiar territory.
If you want to dig deeper, we’ve written about both [cleaning up your website for AI] and [helping AI better understand your organization]. And if you’re curious what AI and search engines currently make of your own site, that’s increasingly something we’re helping clients audit as well.
Michael (not a robot)
