When Clicks Disappear: Rethinking Impact in the Age of AI Search

If you’ve looked at your web analytics recently, you’ve probably seen a familiar story: traffic is slipping.

At first, it’s easy to explain away. Maybe it’s seasonality, or another tweak in Google’s algorithm. But when the trend continues quarter after quarter, you start to realize it’s not a dip. It’s a slide.

For many nonprofits, that traffic graph is more than a marketing metric. It’s the chart in your board packet. It’s the number your funders look to as shorthand for mission reach. In short: for years, traffic has doubled as a proxy for impact.

And now that proxy is breaking.

More people open a browser and ask questions in ChatGPT or Perplexity, or rely on Google’s AI summaries, rather than clicking through to websites. Instead of scanning ten blue links, they get a single synthesized answer.

The research shows why this matters:

• In March 2025, a Pew Research Center study of 68,879 Google searches found that users seeing an AI-generated summary clicked on traditional search result links only 8% of the time, almost half compared to the 15% click rate when no AI summary appeared.

• And an Ahrefs analysis of 300,000 keywords found that AI Overviews correlate with a 34.5% drop in click‑through rate for top-ranking pages compared to similar queries without summaries.

This isn’t a seasonal wrinkle. It’s a systemic shift.

You’ve seen similar tectonic moments before. In 2018, Facebook rewrote its algorithm to favor content from friends and family, and nonprofits that had poured years into building audiences suddenly saw their organic reach evaporate. When Google later introduced featured snippets and “People also ask” boxes, even high-ranking pages lost clicks to zero‑click answers. Each disruption shifted the playbook: create content, drive traffic, prove impact.

But this is bigger.

Because in a zero‑click world, your content may still be reaching millions. You just won’t see it in your dashboard. And if you can’t see it, you can’t prove it. If you can’t prove it… well, you know how that conversation goes.

The room quiets. Development directors shift uneasily. Funders start asking harder questions: “Why is traffic down?” “Are you still reaching people?” “If this continues, what happens next year?”

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: nothing is wrong with your content. Your audience didn’t disappear. Aisha, the 32‑year‑old professional worried about vestibular migraines, still needs answers. But she doesn’t Google your site. She asks ChatGPT, scans the answer, and moves on.

Your work may have informed that answer. You may have eased her worry. But you’ll never see it in your analytics.

So the question most nonprofits are asking: “How can we get the traffic back?” isn’t just the wrong question. It’s a trap.

Because this is my premise: traffic isn’t coming back. At least, not the way it once did.

A New Narrative Begins

If traffic is no longer the measure, what replaces it?

This isn’t a moment to panic. It’s a moment to rethink.

Why was traffic so important? Because it was the closest thing nonprofits had to proof that their work reached people at scale. But traffic was never the mission; it was the metric. And metrics can evolve.

Imagine walking into a board meeting, not to explain a flatlining traffic chart, but to share a new kind of reach: the percentage of AI-generated answers that cite your content. Or the number of high-priority queries (say, early signs of Type 2 diabetes) where your organization’s work surfaces inside Google’s AI Overviews. Or the share of topic coverage you own in emerging AI tools.

To be clear: I don’t know any nonprofits that are doing this yet. But I’ve spoken with operators in the agency and tech space who are already experimenting with measuring and influencing AI responses for their internal marketing:

• They’re running prompt tests in ChatGPT and manually logging results in spreadsheets.

• They’re monitoring how often they appear in AI-generated answers.

• They’re reverse-engineering ChatGPT’s chain of thought to determine how to appear in those answers more often.

It’s early, and it’s messy. But it’s real. And it’s pointing to something strategic.

If that vision holds, your content doesn’t need to pull someone to your site to make an impact. Your expertise can power answers, and those answers can travel out to meet people before they know you exist.

That’s not just relevance. That’s influence.

And it leads to a new way of talking about impact. Instead of saying, “We reached 500,000 people through our website,” you might say:

“Our expertise informs the answers that millions of people see when they search for help on Google, ChatGPT, and other AI tools. We’re not just driving traffic, we’re shaping the information that shapes their decisions.”

This is the pivot: from counting visits to demonstrating influence. From traffic to being the trusted source AI and people rely on.

How To Get Started

What does shifting to this new narrative look like in practice? There’s no established playbook or analytics tool to make this easy. I suggest nonprofits start simple.

Here are some exploratory metrics to consider:

• AI citations: Track how often your content is referenced in AI-generated answers for your key topics. Even a manual prompt test logged in a spreadsheet provides a baseline.

• AI summaries: Track how often your brand or URL appears in Google’s AI Overviews for priority searches.

• Topic coverage: Identify 10-20 high-impact topics or questions in your domain. Test which organizations are most frequently surfaced in AI answers.

• Downstream signals: Monitor branded search, direct visits, or email signups for indirect evidence that your expertise is being discovered, even if people never click first.

These aren’t precision metrics. But they shift the conversation from “Our traffic is down” to “Our content is influencing thousands of daily answers in emerging search platforms.” That’s a narrative that boards and funders can grasp.

The field is scrappy, but early adopters are already shaping this story. Consider this: the nonprofits that begin measuring AI reach now won’t just defend their relevance, they’ll build a competitive advantage. Later, others may follow. But they’ll still be catching up.

Because in a zero-click world, it’s not the organizations with the most traffic that win.

It’s the ones that prove their influence even when no one clicks.

Interested in talking through this?

This shift is still emerging, and I don’t have all the answers. But I’m actively exploring how measuring AI impact can work in practice. If you’d like to understand what early experiments look like, or if you’re curious about what this means for your organization, I’d love to have a conversation.

I’d be glad to book 45 minutes with you to walk through what the current manual testing methods look like, how agencies are approaching this internally, or how you might begin framing these ideas for your board or funders. Email me: spencer@brooks.digital.

I need your input. At the end of day, the future of nonprofit impact measurement isn’t going to be written by experts alone. It will be shaped by those who step forward and begin measuring influence differently.