2026 AI Search & AI Overview Benchmarks: Nonprofit

For years, getting found in search worked one way for nonprofits. Rank on page one, earn the click, and hope that user converts into a donor, a member, or a patient. Then, AI changed the discovery game.

Answer engines and Google AI Overviews now stand between people and your site, answering questions directly with sources baked in, and significantly reducing the need to visit another site. Being found no longer depends on your traditional search engineSearch Engine
A search engine is a website through which users can search internet content.
Learn More rank. It depends on whether AI puts you in the answer, and whether it steers people your way when they ask which charity to trust, where to read up on a condition, or who to turn to for help.

That trips a lot of teams up. Our 2026 AEO Benchmarks Report clocked AI referral traffic at roughly 1.08% of all website visits. The volume is small, but don't write it off, the visits AI does send tend to convert better and faster than traditional search. The point is simply that chasing AI for traffic volume is the wrong goal. The real prize is being the source AI treats as credible, and that's an authority game.

So this report sets referral traffic aside and measures what actually moves for Nonprofit in AI search. Which answer engines do the citing. Which domains and brands win the most citations and mentions. The intents behind those prompts. And where Google AI Overviews show up across the sector's subindustries. It closes with a playbook of the specific moves that earn citations for nonprofits, so make sure you read to the end.

Key takeaways for Nonprofit AEO and AI Overviews

AEO & AI search insights

• Google AI Mode had the highest number of Nonprofit citations at 50%, ahead of Perplexity (27.9%) and ChatGPT (12.2%). Most teams don't have an AI Mode strategy yet. The data says you need one.
• Health organizations dominated Nonprofit AI search. Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic topped the leaderboard, and St. Jude and Children's National rounded out a health-heavy top five. AARP, in third, was the one non-medical name in the mix.
• Education dominated search intent at 51.3% of citations, and commercial intents barely showed up. In plain terms, people came to AI to understand something, and clear explainer content is what earned the citations.

Google AI Overviews

• Google AI Overviews appeared on 44.2% of Nonprofit searches, and more than half (51.9%) of those citations came from pages that also ranked in Google's organic top 10.
• How concentrated each subindustry's leaders were varied widely, from a two-brand race in Healthcare and Human Services to Navy Federal taking nearly half of the Mutuals and Cooperatives AI Overviews.

Methodology

We built this report on Conductor data covering two parts of AI search: the answer engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI ModeAI Mode
AI mode is a search feature using AI to provide comprehensive answers by synthesizing information from multiple sources into direct responses.
Learn More, Gemini, and others) and Google AI Overviews. The answer engine and AIO analyses draw on the same set of 2,590 enterprise Nonprofit domains.

Every metric anchors to the cited domain. A citation counts toward Nonprofit based on the industry of the domain that got cited, not the topic of the question. We classified the questions separately, and only to read intent.

We also built our own industry framework for this report. It doesn't use the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), the standard financial classification behind our 2026 benchmarks report. GICS is designed for public companies and capital markets, and it has no clean slot for Nonprofit brands. So we grouped Nonprofits by US 501(c) tax-exempt categories instead. That's what puts a hospital, a university, a trade association, and a credit union into the same industry.

Here's how we split the Nonprofit sector into subindustries:

For AEO and AI search, we analyzed more than 14 million Nonprofit citations between January 1 and May 31, 2026, in the U.S., across seven engines: ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Google AI Mode, Claude, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Grok. The data covers more than 540,000 distinct prompts.

For Google AI Overviews, we looked into a rolling four-week snapshot, May 20 to June 20, 2026, covering 10.7 million U.S. Google searches. We measured how often those searches triggered an AIO, which domains got cited, what page types the AIO pulled from, and how AI Overviews citations compared against the organic top 10 in SERPs.

AI citation share by answer engine in Nonprofit

We measured AI citations directly and split them by engine. In Nonprofit, Google AI Mode drove more citations than any other engine.

If you expected ChatGPT or Perplexity on top, you're not alone. This measures citations, not users, and two things pushed AI Mode to the front. It cited more sources per answer (9.3 to ChatGPT's 4.6), leaning hard on query fan-out, and it showed up across more Nonprofit prompts than any other engine. Perplexity took the runner-up spot at 27.9%, well ahead of ChatGPT, and it cites heavily, pulling many sources into a single answer.

Read AI Mode's lead for what it is. It tells you where citations get handed out, which is different from where people spend their time. The strategic point holds. If your AEO tracking stops at ChatGPT, you're tracking a sliver of the field and missing the engine that cited Nonprofits most. Weigh that against where your audience actually searches, and cover both.

Nonprofit AI visibility leaders in 2026

Market share in AI search comes down to two questions:

1. Which domains get cited most?
2. Which brands get mentioned most?

Citations are the links AI pulls into an answer; mentions are the times AI names a brand in the text, with or without a link. A brand can lead one and trail the other, so we tracked both.

This is the analysis of the domains and brands that won the most AI market share in Nonprofit, based on AI citations and brand mentions from January to May 2026. All leaders included had at least 1% market share.

Top 5 Nonprofit domains by AI citation market share: overall

• Mayo Clinic (3.5%), Cleveland Clinic (3%), AARP (2.7%), St. Jude (2.2%), and Children's National (2.2%) led.

Health organizations dominated Nonprofit AI search. The symptom, condition, treatment, and medication questions people ask AI. Four of the top five cited domains were a hospital, health system, or medical nonprofit. Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic at the top, with St. Jude and Children's National just behind. Demand met authority. People bring AI an enormous volume of health questions, and the major hospitals answer them with deep, credible medical libraries. AARP (2.7%) was the one exception, a senior-membership organization whose citations landed on retirement, taxes, and Medicare.

Top 5 Nonprofit brands by AI brand mention market share: overall

• Mayo Clinic (3.3%), St. Jude (2.6%), Cleveland Clinic (2.5%), AARP (2.3%), and Medicare (1.9%) led.

The brand mentions told a similar story, with one twist. The same health organization led, but Medicare joined the list. St. Jude climbed from fourth in citations to second in mentions. AI named it more than it cited its site, a sign of unusually strong brand recognition.

Nonprofit AEO leaders by subindustry

The industry view shows who leads Nonprofit AI search visibility overall. The subindustry view shows who you actually compete with. Nonprofit spans a wide range, so we split it into five subindustries, from hospitals to credit unions, grouped by shared 501(c) status. Benchmark against the subindustry closest to yours rather than the whole field. Here is who led each.

Healthcare & Human Services: AEO market share leaders by domain citations

• Mayo Clinic (7.4%) led, followed by Cleveland Clinic (6.3%), St. Jude (4.6%), Children's National (4.5%), and NYU Langone (2.8%).

The big healthcare organizations that anchor Nonprofit led their own subindustry too. Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic on top, with a tight pack of other major hospitals right behind.

Educational & Scientific: AEO market share leaders by domain citations

• Harvard (5.4%) led, followed by Clemson (3.6%), Cornell (2.8%), College Board (2.4%), and Stanford (1.9%).

Harvard led the subindustry at 5.4%, the one marquee name to break away. Much of harvard.edu's pull came from its broad content beyond academics, health explainers included, not scholarly material alone.

Behind Harvard, prestige didn't cleanly decide the order. Clemson out-cited Cornell and Stanford. The College Board, a testing nonprofit, cracked the top five. The very top rewarded a household-name research university. The rest of the field mixed public universities, private schools, and testing nonprofits, with brand-name prestige carrying no automatic weight.

Professional & Business Leagues: AEO market share leaders by domain citations

• ASME (12%) led, ahead of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (6.8%), the American Academy of Family Physicians (5.1%), the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (4.8%), and the National Eczema Association (4.7%).

Specialty associations and standards bodies won here. ASME, the engineering society, led the pack at 12%, nearly double the next highest domain (U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 6.8%).

The margin came down to how specialized ASME is. Its citations concentrated in engineering-standards and certification questions, especially around GD&T, a standard ASME itself sets, and additive-manufacturing codes, where it's the definitive source and the query often names it directly.

Broader, more contested bodies like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce couldn't concentrate citations the same way. AI treats professional bodies as authorities on technical and health questions, and it rewards those that own a specific standard.

Public Charities & Advocacy: AEO market share leaders by domain citations

• AARP (45.1%) led by a huge margin, followed by Fidelity Charitable (2.3%), PAN Foundation (2.2%), OWASP (1.7%), and Tax Foundation (1.6%).

AARP owned nearly half of the AI search citation market share for this subindustry. It took 45.1% of the citations but is the outlier in every sense. A mass-membership organization for people over 50, its citations span retirement, taxes, Medicare, travel discounts, and caregiving. It wins on the breadth and authority of a household brand.

Behind AARP, the rest of the field followed the pattern seen across these subindustries. Each smaller leader was the definitive reference for one narrow, information-dense topic. Fidelity Charitable on donor-advised funds. The PAN Foundation on prescription-drug financial aid. OWASP on web security. The Tax Foundation on tax policy.

One giant generalist at the top. Beneath it, a long tail of specialists, each owning a specific topic space and getting cited for it.

Mutuals & Cooperatives: AEO market share leaders by domain citations

• Navy Federal (34.2%) ran away with it, more than double PenFed (15.5%), with Alliant (4.6%), SSFCU (3%), and BECU (2.3%) far behind.

This was the most concentrated subindustry in this AEO analysis. The two names on top reveal why. Navy Federal (34.2%) and PenFed (15.5%), accounting for nearly half the subindustry domain market share, are both military-affiliated credit unions. Much of Navy Federal's citation volume came from military-specific money questions. Who can join. Deployment protection. Credit cards for the National Guard and military families.

These institutions own a defined community, and AI routed that community's financial questions to them. Same own-a-niche pattern we've seen across these subindustries. Here the niche is an audience.

Search intent in Nonprofit AI search: what content to create to get cited

Who gets cited is half the picture. What people asked when those citations happened is the other half, and that tells you what content to create. We classified the prompts behind every in-scope Nonprofit citation into one of Conductor's seven search intents, more than 540,000 distinct prompts in Nonprofit alone.

Nonprofit AI search prompts skewed heavily towards education. Educational prompts drove 51.3% of citations in this study, and commercial intents like Pricing, Comparison, and Purchase barely registered. People come to AI to understand their health or a cause. So for most nonprofits, especially the health systems, the way to earn a citation is to teach. Clearly, and with authority. AI search is telling brands what content to build and in which format. The brands that listen get cited.

Nonprofit AI Overviews benchmarks

The Nonprofit sector covers five subindustries spanning hospitals, universities, advocacy groups, professional associations, and member cooperatives, all grouped by shared US 501(c) status. What ties them together in search is the kind of query they answer: people trying to understand something. Overall, an AIO appeared on 44.2% of Nonprofit searches in this study. That’s the industry-wide number, not an average of the subindustries; the per-subindustry figures are provided below.

Nonprofit AIO prevalence by subindustry

• An AIO appeared on at least 43.6% of every subindustry's searches, rising to 52.4% for Mutuals & Cooperatives.
• Mutuals & Cooperatives (52.4%) and Public Charities & Advocacy (50.1%) led, with Healthcare & Human Services (47.9%), Educational & Scientific (46.9%), and Professional & Business Leagues (43.6%) close behind.

Nonprofit queries skew heavily informational, exactly the kind Google is quickest to summarize, so an AI answer appears on more than four in 10 searches in every Nonprofit subindustry.

Winning the AIO is table stakes across the industry, and the subindustry numbers back that up.

Four of the five sat above the 44.2% industry figure. Looks odd, but it isn't a contradiction. A single Nonprofit search often surfaces domains from more than one subindustry, a hospital and a health charity on the same query, for example. It counts toward each of those subindustry rates, but only once in the deduplicated industry total. Collapse all those overlapping searches into one number and the industry figure drops below most of its subs instead of landing in the middle.

Page types cited most in Nonprofit AI Overviews

Knowing which page types get cited in Google AI Overviews tells you what content to actually create. The charts below show the top five page types cited in AIO for each Nonprofit subindustry. Here is what each label means:

Where a named format did lead, it points content marketers straight to what to create. The tables below break down the top five page types cited in Google AIO for each Nonprofit subindustry.

Healthcare & Human Services: top five page types in AIO

• Health Info (59.3%) dominated, followed by Other (22.1%), News (6%), Blog (3.9%), and Article (3.6%).

Health information pages, the symptom, condition, and treatment explainers hospitals publish, pulled nearly 60% of AIO citations. That's the clearest single-format story in Nonprofit. For brands in the health system, the citable asset is a dedicated condition or treatment page.

Educational & Scientific: top five page types in AIO

• Other (44%) led, followed by Reference (13.5%), Article (11.9%), Blog (9.4%), and Guide/Resource (8.1%).

The Other bucket topped this subindustry at 44%, but that says more about how universities build their sites than about a real content type. Most of these were lesson, subject, and topic pages on .edu and education domains, like a Stanford explainer on MLOps or a College Board subject page. Academic content. Set that bucket aside and the story sharpens: reference pages pulled 13.5% and research articles 11.9%. The encyclopedic and scholarly content that Google reaches for on academic queries.

Professional & Business Leagues: top five page types in AIO

• Other (48.5%) led, with Reference (22.4%) a clear second, then Guide/Resource (7.9%), Article (6.3%), and News (6%).

Other led at 48.5%, again a reflection of site structure within this subindustry more than a single format. Most were guidance and topic pages on association domains, think a U.S. Chamber explainer on filing a beneficial-ownership report, an AAOS page on recovering from a knee replacement. They read as resources but sat on URL paths our classifier couldn’t label.

Because so much of that bucket is really guidance and reference content, the practical read is that professional bodies earned AIO citations through the material they are known for: reference pages (22.4%), guides and resources (7.9%), and articles (6.3%). Treat Other here as more of the same, not a separate format.

Public Charities & Advocacy: top five page types in AIO

• Other (54%) led, followed by Article (13.5%), Guide/Resource (11.3%), Reference (7.9%), and News (5.4%).

More than half of AIO citations (54%) fell into Other, the widest spread of any subindustry. Charity and advocacy groups publish cause- and condition-specific pages on highly idiosyncratic paths, so our classifier has nothing consistent to grab. Much of it traced to a few condition and issue advocates.

The National Psoriasis Foundation alone drove a large share, with pages like a psoriasis diet guide and severity explainers, alongside tax, consumer-debt, and environmental advocates. Informational pages that fit no standard template. Among named formats, standard articles pulled 13.5% and guides pulled 11.3%.

Mutuals & Cooperatives: top five page types in AIO

• Guide/Resource (45.1%) led outright, followed by Other (20.4%), Blog (16.4%), Article (10.7%), and Document/PDF (3.1%).

This was the only Nonprofit subindustry where a how-to format topped the list. Credit unions and member cooperatives earn AIO citations the same way: by publishing clear, practical explanatory guides.

Nonprofit AIO share of voice leaders by subindustry

The AIO winners ran from a two-brand race in healthcare to a single domain taking nearly half of one subindustry. The tables below break down the top five domains cited in Google AIO for each Nonprofit subindustry.

Healthcare & Human Services: top winning domains for AIO share of voice

• Mayo Clinic (15.6%) and Cleveland Clinic (14.1%) ran the table, followed by Johns Hopkins (4%), Penn Medicine (1.9%), and Kaiser Permanente (1.9%).

The two health organizations together pulled more than a quarter of the subindustry's AIO citations. When Google needs a source for a health question, it reaches for the biggest, most recognized medical brands first.

Educational & Scientific: top winning domains for AIO share of voice

• Harvard (6.9%) led, followed by Cornell (2.6%), Khan Academy (2.4%), LibreTexts (2.1%), and Stanford (1.6%).

Harvard led here at 6.9%, more than double any other domain. Behind it, no one else broke away. Cornell, Khan Academy, LibreTexts, and Stanford clustered between 1.6% and 2.6%, a long tail of universities and open-education sites. One big name aside, academic authority in AI Overviews was diffuse.

Professional & Business Leagues: top winning domains for AIO share of voice

• American Academy of Dermatology (8.8%), U.S. Chamber of Commerce (8.1%), American Academy of Family Physicians (7.4%), and American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (6.4%) led, with the American Lung Association (4.4%) close behind.

Medical associations swept the top of this subindustry. Google treats professional bodies as trusted authorities on health and business questions, so the specialty academies took the citations.

Public Charities & Advocacy: top winning domains for AIO share of voice

• AARP (14.6%), and National Psoriasis Foundation (14.3%) ran away with it, more than triple the American Migraine Foundation (3.9%), Tax Foundation (2.7%), and American Red Cross (2.7%) behind.

Two very different organizations tied for the top. AARP, a mass-membership senior organization, and the National Psoriasis Foundation, a single-condition health advocate, each took about 14% of the subindustry's AI Overview citations. Behind them, focus paid off. The American Migraine Foundation out-cited the Red Cross. Two winning moves emerged: massive membership reach on one side, deep single-topic authority on the other. General charity missions didn't crack the list.

Mutuals & Cooperatives: top winning domains for AIO share of voice

• Navy Federal (44.9%) dominated, nearly ten times the next credit union, Alliant (4.4%), followed by CU SoCal (3.8%), PenFed (2.5%), and UMCU (2%).

This was the most concentrated subindustry in this report. A single member-owned institution took almost half of all citations. In nonprofit finance, Navy Federal effectively owned the AI Overview.

Where AI search goes from here for Nonprofit

Getting found now runs on two separate channels: the answer engines like ChatGPT, and the AI Overviews Google now shows above its search results. They don't always agree.

An organization can lead one and slip in the other.

St. Jude and Children's National make the point. Two of the most-cited health systems in the answer engines, yet neither lands in the AIO top five, where Johns Hopkins, Penn Medicine, and Kaiser Permanente take over. Know the data of only one channel and you'll misjudge your own standing. So know both, where you sit in AI citations, and how you preform in Google AIO.

Neither channel plays by the old rules either. Nearly half of Nonprofit AIO citations (48.1%) went to pages that never reached Google's organic top 10. Organic search rankingsRankings
Rankings in SEO refers to a website’s position in the search engine results page.
Learn More still matters, but it no longer guarantees the citation on its own.

Here's what the Nonprofit data in this study tells you:

• Look beyond ChatGPT. AI Mode lapped the field in Nonprofit, taking half of all citations, so an AI visibility measurement strategy that ends at ChatGPT misses the engine citing nonprofits most. Track the engines that cite you, starting with AI Mode.
• Give the engines something to pull by creating thorough, in-depth content. AI Mode fans a question out into many sub-queries and rewards pages with real depth and structure. Thin content gives it nothing to lift.
• Lead with teaching. More than half of Nonprofit citations came from educational questions. The clearest explanation wins the citation. Match content strategy to the top cited format in your subindustry. Condition and treatment pages for health systems. Reference and guides for associations and charities. Helpful how-to guides for credit unions.
• Own a specific subject, not just a name. In Nonprofits, depth of authority beats breadth of name. ASME owns engineering standards. The winning charities each own one subject, from tax policy to a single condition. Navy Federal owns member finance by going all-in on one community. The payoff runs both ways. The organizations AI cited most were also the ones it named most, so earning real authority wins the mention and the citation together.
• Understand your own subindustry before you set targets. The AI Overview field ranges from a near-monopoly in member finance, to two-brand contests in health and advocacy, to wide-open races in education and the professional bodies, where no one reaches 10%. If a leader owns your space, chase the questions it neglects. If the space is open, the deepest answer takes the box.
• Track how AI describes you. Whether AI vouches for you or steers people elsewhere is a different measurement, and it takes a read of your own brand's AI visibility.

AI search didn’t retire SEO. Ranking and AI citation are two games worth playing, and the organizations that win Nonprofit search will play both.