How to Get Your Charity Found by AI: What We Measured (2026)

The short answer. To get your charity found by AI, do five things. Check what ChatGPT, Google, Perplexity and Claude say about you today. Make your name, registration number and one-line description identical everywhere they appear. Make your website readable by AI crawlers. Get listed on the sites AI already reads, starting with your regulator's register. Then check again once a month, because change takes weeks, not days.

Want us to check for you? Get a free AI check for your charity.

Key numbers, as of 25 September 2026

GiveReady is an open directory of 41,000+ charity and nonprofit profiles, and it logs every visit from AI companies' crawlers. Since May 2026 we have also asked AI engines the same ten charity questions every day and recorded which sites they cite. These are the numbers that came out of that.

Two cautions. Most crawler visits build search indexes and training data; only a handful happen while a real person is asking a question. And most of our citation readings come from Perplexity (324 readings, against 24 each for ChatGPT and Claude), so the list of most-cited sites is mainly Perplexity's picture. The method is at the end of this page.

How do I check what AI says about my charity?

You can check what AI says about your charity in about ten minutes by asking four AI tools the same five questions and writing down whether each one names you. Use a private or logged-out browser window so your own history does not change the answers. Working this out took me weeks, and we still track it every day. If you would rather not do it by hand, the free AI Visibility Audit on this page runs the same checks for you: get your free audit.

Ask each question in ChatGPT, in Google (the AI answer at the top of the results, or AI Mode), in Perplexity and in Claude. Fill in the brackets with your own details.

1. "What charities help [the people you serve] in [your town or region]?" This is the donor's question.
2. "Where can I get help with [the problem you work on] in [your area]?" This is the question the people you help ask.
3. "Which organisations run [your kind of work] in [your country]?" This is the funder's question.
4. "Is [your charity's name] a legitimate charity?"
5. "What does [your charity's name] do?"

For each answer, note one of three results: named, not named, or named wrongly (old address, wrong description, confused with another charity). Also note which websites the answer links to. Those links show you where that engine looked, and they are the places you most need to be.

Questions 4 and 5 contain your name, so they test whether AI knows the right facts about you. Questions 1 to 3 do not, and they are the ones that bring in new donors, so a miss there matters most.

Why doesn't ChatGPT mention my charity?

When an AI assistant leaves a small charity out of its answer, the usual reason is that its search never found the charity's pages, not that it read them and preferred someone else. AI assistants answer these questions by running a web search first and then writing from what comes back. If your pages are not in what comes back, you cannot be named.

We can see this most clearly with Claude, which reports the pages it retrieved separately from the ones it cited. In 24 daily readings since 21 August 2026, Claude retrieved a GiveReady page zero times. Perplexity and ChatGPT report a single list, so for them we cannot split "not found" from "found and passed over", but the pattern of misses looks the same.

Each AI engine searches its own index, so being found by one tells you little about the next. On 24 September we asked reworded versions of the same questions. Our Cape Town youth charities guide was cited by Perplexity 8 times out of 8 and by ChatGPT 0 times out of 8. Our youth mentoring guide went the other way: ChatGPT 4 of 4, Perplexity 1 of 4.

Claude searches using Brave's search index, so a page Brave has not indexed cannot be cited by Claude. On 25 September none of GiveReady's seven giving guides were in Brave's index, which is why Claude has not cited them once.

Google matters most by volume. Conductor's study of more than 14 million nonprofit citations found Google's AI Mode produced half of them. If you only have time to fix one index, make sure Google has your pages, which you can check for free with Google Search Console.

Wording matters less than people expect. Once a page was in an engine's index, reworded versions of the question still cited it 18 times out of 21 in our test. You do not need to guess the exact phrase a donor will type. You need to be findable at all.

Step 1: Make your facts identical everywhere

The first step is to make your charity's name, registration number, address and one-sentence description the same on every site that lists you, because AI engines trust facts that agree across sources. Write the one sentence once, in the form "[Name] is a registered charity (number [X]) that [does what] for [whom] in [where]", and use it everywhere.

Check and correct these, in this order:

1. Your regulator's register: the Charity Commission for England and Wales, OSCR in Scotland, the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland, or the IRS record behind your US 501(c)(3) status.
2. Your own website's About page.
3. Candid (GuideStar) and Charity Navigator if you are a US nonprofit.
4. Your Google Business Profile.
5. Your LinkedIn page.
6. Any directory or fundraising platform that already lists you, GiveReady included.

The register is the one to get right first. It was the most-cited site in our tracker after GiveReady itself, appearing in 91 of 372 answers. Read your register entry as a stranger would. If the activities description is vague or years out of date, that is the text an AI will quote about you.

Step 2: Make your website readable by AI

The second step is to make sure AI crawlers are allowed onto your website and can read what is there without running scripts or opening PDFs. Many charity websites block AI crawlers without anyone deciding to, through a website builder's default or a security setting.

Open yourcharity.org/robots.txt in a browser. If you see "Disallow: /" under GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Googlebot, ask whoever runs your site to allow them. If you use Cloudflare, check its AI crawler settings too.

Then check four things on the site itself:

1. The first sentence of your About page says who you are, your registration number, what you do, for whom and where. That sentence is the one most likely to be quoted.
2. A plain FAQ page answers the questions donors and funders ask, each answer in full sentences: where the money goes, who you help, how many, where, and how to give.
3. Important facts are in the page text, not only in images, PDFs or pop-ups.
4. Structured data tells machines the basic facts. Ask your web person to add a block like this to your home page, with your own details:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "NGO",
  "name": "Your Charity Name",
  "url": "https://www.yourcharity.org",
  "identifier": "Registered charity 1234567",
  "description": "Your one-sentence description.",
  "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "addressLocality": "Your town", "addressCountry": "GB" },
  "sameAs": [
    "https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search/-/charity-details/1234567",
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/your-charity"
  ]
}
</script>

What about llms.txt? It is a small text file some sites publish to guide AI tools. GiveReady publishes one, and we cannot show that it has changed a single citation. Add it if it is easy; do not spend money on it.

Step 3: Get listed where AI already reads

The third step is to be listed on the sites AI engines already search, because they cite registers, directories and fundraising platforms far more often than small charities' own websites. In our tracker, the six most-cited sites after GiveReady were the Charity Commission register, LinkedIn, GreatNonprofits, GlobalGiving, GoFundMe and gov.uk. None of them is a charity's own site.

Places worth your time:

1. Your regulator's register, kept current (step 1).
2. Charity directories and review sites: GreatNonprofits, Candid, Charity Navigator, GlobalGiving if you fundraise there.
3. Partner and funder pages. Ask any funder or partner that lists its grantees to include a sentence about you and a link.
4. Local news. A single story in a local paper gives an engine an independent source that confirms you exist and what you do.
5. GiveReady. AI companies' crawlers read 2,023 different charity profiles on GiveReady in the last 30 days. If your charity is one of our 41,000, you can claim your profile for free and correct it, so the version AI reads is the right one.

What happened when we did this ourselves

GiveReady went from never cited to cited in most Perplexity answers in about two months, by publishing short, checked pages that answer the exact questions donors ask. From 25 May to mid-June 2026, Perplexity cited GiveReady in 0 of our 10 daily questions. We published our first giving guides on 30 May: short shortlists of verified charities, each with its registration number, readable without JavaScript. The first citation came in mid-June. By mid-July it was 3 of 10, and on 1 August it was 9 of 10. Since 1 August, Perplexity has cited GiveReady in 309 of 460 answers, about two in three.

It moves around. Today's reading was 4 of 10, and single days swing by two or three either way. ChatGPT has cited us in 11 of 24 readings. Claude has cited us in none, for the Brave reason above, and we have not fixed that yet.

A second, smaller example. In mid-September we did the same work on the website of the Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund, a small grant fund I run. Since then, four applicants have told us they found the fund by asking an AI assistant. That is a small number, but it is why GiveReady now helps charities with this.

Step 4: Measure it monthly

The last step is to ask the same five questions once a month and compare the table with last month's, because AI answers change slowly and a single day's result proves little. Put a date in your calendar for the first week of each month and keep the tables together.

Expect weeks, not days. Our first citation came about two weeks after our first guides went live, and it took two months to reach 9 of 10 on Perplexity. Search indexes are refreshed on their own schedules, and nothing you do today shows up in an answer tomorrow.

How we measured this

Citation tracking. Every day since 25 May 2026 we have asked the same ten questions about youth charities in the UK, the US and South Africa, plus surf therapy and music education, through each engine's API with web search switched on. Perplexity (model sonar) runs daily: 324 readings to 25 September. ChatGPT (gpt-4.1 with web search) and Claude (claude-sonnet-4-6 with web search) have run since 21 August from a laptop, with some days missed: 24 readings each. A question counts as "cited" when giveready.org appears in the answer's sources. The list of most-cited sites counts each site once per answer, across all 372 answers.

What this is not. The API is not the consumer app. chatgpt.com and claude.ai run their own searches, so treat our numbers as a repeatable test, not a copy of what every user sees. We do not test Google's AI Mode directly; the Google figure is Conductor's. And the ten questions are ours, and GiveReady's guides were written to answer that kind of question, so our citation rate is a best case.

Crawler visits. Counted from GiveReady's own server logs by the published crawler names of OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Meta. Visitors we cannot identify are left out. "While answering a person" means the ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User crawlers, which fetch a page at the moment someone asks a question.

The live crawler counts are public at giveready.org/api/ai-traffic.

Want us to do the check for you?

We will ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity 19 questions about your charity and send you a one-page report: whether you are named, who is named instead, and three fixes in order. Ask for a free AI Visibility Audit. It is free, and it arrives within two working days.

Written by Geordie Wardman, who runs the Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund, a small grant fund, and built GiveReady after running into this problem himself.