AI visibility for nonprofits and foundations is whether an assistant names you when someone asks a question like “best charity for <cause> to donate to”. It is decided by whether the engine can read your site and whether you are in the pages it retrieves — both are checkable, and the first is fixable from inside the site.
Four shapes of question decide AI visibility in nonprofits and foundations: best-for, alternatives-to, cheapest, and for-a-situation. The lines below are the kind an assistant hears every day; replace the brackets with your market.
An assistant answering those questions retrieves pages and names the companies in them. For nonprofits and foundations the pages it retrieves are usually:
A site that is not in those sources is not in the answer, however well it reads. A site that cannot be read is not in them either — and that part is checkable.
Nonprofits and foundations sites are most often built on WordPress, Squarespace, Wix. The checks they fail most are the ones that come with that:
What the agent does here: runs the 23 checks on your pages, switches on the fixes it can apply from inside the site — AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt, Organization schema in every page, a sitemap, /llms.txt — writes the answer-first opening and the search description for your approval, and counts every AI visit page by page so you see which questions already bring an engine to you.
Questions of four shapes: best-for, alternatives-to, cheapest and for-a-situation. For nonprofits and foundations that means lines like “best charity for
Charity Navigator, GuideStar and national registers; Wikipedia; annual reports on the organization's site; press coverage. Being in those sources matters as much as the site itself.
brand has a wikidata record and a wikipedia article — no Wikidata item with the register number and the official website. sameas links to external profiles are present — the charity register and the watchdog profiles not linked from the site. pages open with the answer — the "what we do" page that opens with history rather than the programs and their results.
Create the Wikidata item with the register number; link it and the watchdog profiles with sameAs. Publish the annual report's key figures as visible text on a dated page. Open the programs page with what the organization does and where, in one sentence.
The free page check runs the 23 checks on your public pages — the ones above, measured on yours.