The King is Dead, Long Live AI

Welcome to this edition of Click and Pledge's Fundraising Command Center podcast where we talk the why, the what, and the how in Click and Pledge's ecosystem. This is the why series.

It's good to be here. And, frankly, we have a bit of a wake up call to deliver today. We are looking at a shift in the digital landscape that is. Well, it's so fundamental it makes the move from desktop to mobile look like a minor software update.

That is a big claim. I mean, usually when people talk about paradigm shifts in tech, they just mean, you know, a new iPhone came out with a slightly better camera. But looking at the research pile we're diving into today, I think your assessment holds up.

It does.

We've titled this deep dive, the king is dead. And just to be clear for everyone listening, we are not talking about Charles or Elvis.

No. We're talking about the ruler of the Internet for the last, what, twenty five years. The search engine. No. Specifically, the era where typing keywords into a little white box was the main way human beings navigated the world.

That era is ending.

And that brings us to the mission for this discussion. We have two goals. First, we need to explain why, based on the data, investing your nonprofit's limited budget in search advertising, you know, paying for those links at the top of Google, is likely a complete waste of money right now.

And second, and probably more importantly, we need to map out what you should be doing instead. Because if the old king search is dying, a new king has already taken the throne. That king is artificial intelligence. And, right now, most non profits are totally invisible to it.

Okay, so let's start with the philosophy before we get to the scary numbers. The research talks about a shift from knowing to understanding. That sounds a little academic, maybe a little abstract for a Tuesday morning. Can we break that down?

It sounds academic, but it is actually very, very practical. Think back to the early two thousands. If you went to Google and typed in George Washington or, you know, let's make it relevant, clean water projects in Kenya. Yeah. What actually happened?

You got a list. The 10 blue doors.

Exactly. You got links. The search engine didn't know what a clean water project was. It didn't understand the concept of water or Kenya. It just knew which pages had those words and had other people linking to them.

It was a librarian pointing you to a shelf basically.

Handing you a stack of books and saying, good luck. Figure That's it it.

So the burden was entirely on you. You had to click the link, read the page, realize it wasn't what you wanted. Maybe it was some old blog post from 2003. Go back, click another link and try to piece it all together in your own head. That is the era of access to knowledge.

But think about the friction there. Query, scan, click, read, filter, synthesize. Every single one of those steps is a conversion leak. It's a place where you lose the user's attention.

Oh yeah. If the page loads too slowly, gone. If the font is too small, gone.

If the answer is buried in the fourth paragraph, And

today, how is the AI experience different?

We've crossed a threshold. Now, when a user asks an AI which food bank in Virginia is most effective they don't get a reading list, they get an answer, they get comprehension. The AI has already done all the reading, the filtering and the synthesizing.

It hands you the understanding directly.

It removes the scavenger hunt And for a non profit, this is frankly terrifying if you aren't ready. In the old world, you paid Google to show your link. Then you hope they clicked. Then you hope they read your mission statement. Then you hope they understood it enough to care.

That is a lot of hoop to pin a budget on. You're essentially betting on the user's patience.

You are. In the new world the user asks, Who should I support? And the AI tells them the story. It synthesizes your impact if it knows about you.

Okay, so that's the user experience shift. But I can hear the skeptics listening right now saying, that sounds like cool futurism, but you know, Google is still a monopoly. Everyone I know still uses Google.

And they would be, right for now. Google is still massive. But in technology, you never look at the static snapshot. You have to look at the trajectory. Trajectory for traditional searches, well, it's a disaster.

Let's look at the actual data points here because I think this is where the king is dead argument really gets its teeth. For the first time since 2015, Google's global search market share has dipped below 90%.

Now 89.6% still sounds like total dominance. And if that were the only data point, I wouldn't be worried. But you have to look at what's happening on the other side of the ledger.

Which is this explosive growth in AI platform traffic.

The number here is staggering. 721%. AI platform traffic grew by an average of 721% in just one year.

That's unheard of.

It is. To put that in perspective, look at the ratio of users. A year ago, for every 10 people using Google, there was maybe one person using an AI tool. In just twelve months, that gap closed to roughly 4.7 to one, the ratio halved in a single year. Wow.

It is the fastest technology adoption in history, faster than social media, faster than the PC. As of March 2025, fifty two percent of U. S. Adults have used a large language model.

Okay, but I have to ask, are they using it for search? Or are they just, you know, it to write funny limericks or cheat on their homework?

That is the key question and the data says two thirds of them are using it like a search engine. They're using it to find answers. I mean, Gartner, who's usually pretty conservative with these things, is predicting a 25% decline in traditional search volume by 2026.

So if my entire donor acquisition strategy is built on people typing keywords into a search bar, I'm building on a foundation that's actively shrinking.

You're fighting for a smaller and smaller piece of the pie. And the people leaving the search pie first are likely the younger, more tech savvy users, you know, the future donors you wanna cultivate.

Which brings us to the so what for our listeners, because nonprofits spend a lot of real money on search engine marketing. We've been told for a decade that Salev is the holy grail of acquisition. If you're not bidding on keywords, you aren't in the game.

And that advice is becoming dangerous. Even before this whole AI shift, the economics of search ads for charities were, to put it, mildly questionable.

Let's crunch the numbers. Suppose I'm a development director, I buy some Google ads, what does it actually cost me to get a new donor through that channel?

It's expensive. You're looking at a cost per acquisition or CPA of say $36 to $50 on the low end. In competitive sectors like disaster relief or cancer research, it could easily go over $100 to acquire a single donor.

Okay, playing devil's advocate here. If I pay $50 to get a donor, and that donor stays with me for ten years, and gives me $50 a year, that's a great investment, that's a 10x return.

That is the IF that bankrupts you. That hypothetical donor who stays for ten years, they almost never come from search ads. We have the retention data for this specific channel and it is abysmal. For first time donors acquired through search advertising, the retention rate is sitting at about 7.2%.

Wait, let me make sure I heard that right. 7.2%.

Yes. That means if you pay to acquire a 100 donors, 93 of them will give once and never speak to you again. I mean, four out of five first time donors never give a second gift.

So you're just pouring expensive buckets of water into a pool that has a massive hole in the bottom.

Exactly. It's a transactional channel. You caught them in a moment. Maybe they felt guilty. Maybe they saw a headline, but you didn't build a relationship.

They clicked the link, made a transaction, and left.

Now, whenever we talk about the cost of ads, there's always one rebuttal from the nonprofit sector. The Google Ad Grant. It's free money. Google gives us $10,000 a month. Why wouldn't I take free money?

Ah, yes. The free money myth. This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of nonprofit marketing. Look, on paper, 10,000 a month in in kind advertising sounds incredible. It sounds like a windfall, but the reality is it's almost impossible to spend.

Why? Is the interface just that hard?

It's not just the interface, it's the rules of the game. First off, the average nonprofit utilizes only about 3% of that grant. So that's roughly $300 out of the 10,000.

That seems incredibly low. Why can't they spend it?

Because Google relegates grant accounts to what they call a secondary auction.

Secondary auction. Okay. Explain that like I'm five.

Okay. Imagine you're trying to get a seat on an airplane, paying customers, commercial businesses or even other charities paying cash they have confirmed tickets. The Google Ad grant is a standby ticket. You know that feeling.

Oh yeah.

You're standing at the gate waiting hoping to see if there's an empty seat. You only get on the plane if nobody with real money wants that seat.

That paints a vivid picture. So if I'm bidding on donate to cancer research and a hospital is paying real cash for that keyword.

Your ad simply doesn't show up. You're invisible. You only get the leftovers, the keywords nobody else wants to pay for. And on top of that, Google requires you to maintain a 5% click through rate to keep the grant active. That's a high bar.

So it requires a professional level of management to maintain a grant that gives you second class status.

Exactly. It ends up consuming staff time, which is real money chasing free money that doesn't really convert. It's a distraction.

And you know, this brings us to the behavioral aspect. We kind of touched on this in our house rich, cash poor deep dive. There seems to be this fundamental disconnect between how we think people give and how they actually give.

It's the exact same logical fallacy we saw with wealth screening. In that episode we discussed how non profits try to find donors by looking at who has a big house. That's wealth data. Here, we're trying to find donors by looking at who types a keyword. That's search data.

Both are trying to use these data proxies to, I guess, bypass the hard work of relationship building.

Correct. You're trying to buy access to strangers. But think about your own behavior. When was the last time you woke up, opened Google, and typed, Who should I donate money to today?

Never. I donate because a friend asks me, or I see a problem in my community, or I am involved with an organization personally.

Alright. Search is designed for transactional intent. Buy running shoes, plumber near me, pizza delivery. It's for solving a specific, immediate problem. Philanthropy isn't a transaction, it's a relationship.

And we have data on this too, right? Something like 93% of giving decisions come through word-of-mouth, personal connections, or social proof.

Trust. Trust is the currency of philanthropy. You can't buy trust with a keyword bid. Whether you're paying for wealth data or paying for clicks, you are barking up the wrong tree. You're trying to mechanize something that is inherently human.

So let's recap where we are. The old King search is dying. It's expensive. The retention is terrible, and the behavior doesn't match how people actually give. But the new King AI is rising.

Is this actually good news for non profits? Or just a new headache?

I honestly believe it's fantastic news, if you act now. Because here's the secret, the new King is not pay to play, yet.

You mean I can't just call up Open AI and buy a sponsored answer in chat, GPT?

Not right now. Yeah. You can't buy your way into an AI's synthesis. If someone asks an AI about effective environmental charities, the AI isn't checking who paid the most, it's checking who has the most coherent, verifiable story on the web. You have to earn the answer.

That actually levels the playing field. A small nonprofit with a great story could theoretically outrank a giant organization with a bad story.

Absolutely. But only if the AI can see you.

Okay. So let's get practical. I'm a nonprofit leader. I'm sold on the shift. What do I actually do?

Because usually when we talk about AI, the advice is buy this expensive software, but we've prepared a kind of hygiene check for our listeners that is totally different.

Yes. Think of this as thirty minutes of technical hygiene that could determine your visibility for the next decade.

Step one involves a little file called robots. Txt. I suspect most of our listeners have never looked at this file.

Most people haven't. Every website has this file. It lives at yoursite.org, growbots. Txt. It is essentially a do not disturb sign for the internet.

It tells web crawlers, the bots that scan the internet, where they're allowed to go.

Right. So historically, publishers like the New York Times would block these bots because they didn't want their articles scraped for free. Were protecting their IP.

Right. But you are not the New York Times.

Yeah.

You're a nonprofit. You want to be scraped. You want to be cited. You want the AI to know your impact so it can tell your story to a potential donor.

But we're finding that many nonprofits have this blocked by default.

Yes, many web developers just leave the default settings on or they use a security plugin that blocks everything unknown and this often blocks bots like GPT bot, Claude bot or CC bot.

So the action item is checkyourrobots.txt if you see disallow next to those AI names you are telling the future to ignore you.

Fix that immediately, Unblock the bots. Let them learn.

Okay. Step two is a new concept for me and I love this one. LLMS. TXT. What is this?

This is a fascinating new standard emerging from the tech community. Think of it as a as a resume for robots.

A resume for robots. I like that.

Right. Right now when an AI visits your website, it has to guess what's important. It reads your RESI homepage, tries to navigate your drop down menus, gets stuck in a PDF, it might get confused. An LMSS. TXT file is a simple text file you add to your site that gives the AI a structured cheat sheet.

So it just says we are organization X, we do Y, here's our impact report, here are our programs.

Exactly, it's low effort, high leverage, it ensures the AI has your facts straight, you can find the standards at llmstxt.org but it's basically just handing your business card directly to the algorithm. It removes the ambiguity.

And step three is a test. We're calling it the Turing test for your brand.

This is the easiest step and also the most fun. Just go to ChatGPT or Plaud or Gemini and ask about your organization. But here's the trick, don't give it any context. Just ask what does my nonprofit do? Or how effective is my nonprofit?

And what are we looking for?

We're looking for hallucinations. If it says, I don't know, or if it makes up facts, or if it confuses you with another charity, you have a problem. It means your content is too thin or you're blocking the crawlers.

If the AI doesn't know you, you're invisible in the age of synthesis. Which leads to the final step, you have to actually have something to say.

This is the story over mission statement rule. An AI cannot synthesize a generic mission statement from 2015, it needs learning material.

We have to remember how these models work. They're prediction engines. They need patterns.

Exactly. They need stories of impact, clear data, case studies. If your website is just a donate button and a paragraph of marketing fluff, the AI has nothing to work with. You have to publish content that explains how you solve problems.

Content is still king, but now the audience isn't just a human, it's a machine reading everything at once to explain it to a human.

That is the perfect way to frame it. You are feeding the synthesizer.

So to recap this deep dive, the era of 10 blue doors is ending. We're moving to an era of immediate understanding. And for nonprofits, this is a chance to stop wasting money on low retention search ads and start building a digital presence actually tells a story the machines can understand.

The phrase 'Leroy et mour, vivre leroy, the king is dead, long live the king' was originally about the instant transfer of power. There was no gap. The moment the old king died, the new one was already reigning.

And that feels very true right now. We aren't waiting for the AI era. It's already here.

It is on the throne. The old king was the paradigm of purchasing relationships, buying access to strangers via search or demographics. The new king is AI mediated understanding and behavioral intelligence.

And honestly, it sounds like a better king for the nonprofit world. It rewards substance over ad budget.

It does. And I want to be clear about something from our perspective at Click and Pledge. We don't sell search advertising. We don't sell wealth screening data. Our revenue comes from platform fees when you successfully process donations.

Which means we don't have a horse in the race of keeping the old king alive.

Exactly. We can offer this transparent advice because we don't make money when you waste yours on bad ads. We want you to succeed because that's how we succeed. The window to establish your presence in this new AI ecosystem is open, but it won't stay free to play forever. Now is the time to act.

I want to leave you with a provocative thought to mull over. If 93% of giving is relational and AI is becoming the primary way humans relate to information, is your digital strategy ready to build a relationship with a machine so that machine can advocate for you?

That is the question of the decade.

Leroy Moore, long live the AI. I thank you for diving deep with us today.

Thank you.

For more information about this and all Click and Pledge products, make sure to visit clickandpledge.com and request a one on one training or demo. Don't forget to subscribe to stay up to date with the Fundraising Command Center.