By Jonathan Benton, Kristen Witkin, Diego Ruiz, and Marc Ruben Last week, we shared some uplifting results from year-end fundraising, but there was one EOY campaign trend that wasn’t quite so sunny: website fundraising.
Backing up: in November, we posted about the “AI search cliff” — a drop in organic search traffic as a result of AI search overviews rolled out last year. The short version:
Despite fewer web visits from organic search, giving to homepage-linked donation forms was slightly up (at least for our clients, in the time period of March–August) — potentially the result of a generally strong fundraising environment across a range of different sectors.
At the time, it seemed like AI overviews weren’t disrupting the kinds of searches that lead to gifts. But all that seems to have changed.
End-of-year 2025 painted a very different picture.
In December, we wanted to see if that web giving trend was still holding up, so we rechecked the data across 18 organizations. Like last time, we saw a drop in traffic. But this one was much more dramatic among our cohort.
The median drop in unique users coming from organic search was nearly 40% in December 2025 compared to December 2024 — a bigger drop than our March–August analysis, where the YOY reductions ranged from single-digits to low double-digits.
But unlike mid-2025, when website revenue seemed to be holding steady despite the AI search cliff, December website revenue was 5% down year over year.
Both of our analyses looked only at giving directly sourced to websites, excluding donations tracked to other channels like advertising, email, text messaging, and automatically recurring gifts.
A 5% drop in donations is, of course, smaller than a 40% drop in traffic — but it’s also coming at a time when we saw other giving channels increase. For our clients, email revenue mostly held steady this end of year. Giving through text messaging was way up. Digital advertising also saw big year-over-year jumps.
So while we were seeing improvements in fundraising across most of digital this year, the reduction in organic traffic caused by AI search really does appear to be driving down end-of-year giving on nonprofit websites, when organizations rely on website giving for a big portion of hitting their annual revenue goals.
WHAT’S WORKING
We shared a few recommendations in our original analysis. Primarily — ensuring Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is part of your digital strategy, to make sure your organization shows up, gets cited, and earns trust in AI-driven responses relevant to your cause. Additionally, if you’re not already doing ongoing testing on your homepage and donation forms, now would be a great time to start seeing what can move the needle and gain more donors, especially since your site visitors are now likely a bit more engaged audience!
But even clients that were down on organic search this year mostly saw year-over-year improvements in digital fundraising overall. What was true for these groups?
They were expanding to new channels (text messaging in particular saw big year-over-year increases for many clients we work with).
On email, many of these groups were expanding their audiences (some experimenting with reactivation strategies using our data co-op, Scout Quest!).
Many groups were investing in new advertising opportunities (podcast and other audio ads were BIG drivers of ROI this year). Looking ahead, we’re all following the news that ChatGPT is getting ready to roll out its own advertising offering. Google is saying Gemini won’t. Either way, we’re (unfortunately) expecting that many groups will need to pay to get content in front of people, while the organic/free places to reach large audiences get squeezed out.
Have any other questions or want to share what you’re seeing happen for your organization in the age of AI? Shoot us an email at aeo@mrss.com — we’d love to talk more!