Short answer: AI search is genuinely changing how people find information, and Google is a big part of that shift. But the nonprofits in our client base aren’t seeing Ad Grants performance collapse alongside organic traffic. If anything, donation quality per click is holding steady or improving, because Ad Grants (especially Performance Max) reaches audiences and placements, including AI Overviews, that organic search alone no longer guarantees.
What the NYT article found
A recent New York Times investigation, “Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed” (July 2026), lays out how far Google’s AI Mode has changed search behavior. Users are writing queries three times longer than before and spending one to nine extra minutes inside AI Mode rather than clicking through to a traditional results page, per research the Times cites. One study found that in roughly 75% of AI Mode sessions, users never left Google at all, meaning users are not clicking on to links outside of Google to read more information.
The downstream effect on the open web is significant. Cloudflare reports that human traffic to business websites in finance, publishing, and retail fell nearly 40% between June 2025 and April 2026. Even Wikipedia, one of the most heavily cited sources on the internet, saw an 8% decline in human visitors over the past year, according to the Wikimedia Foundation. Google disputes the scale of the impact and says it still sends billions of clicks to the web weekly, but the direction of the trend is hard to argue with: search is becoming a place where people get answers, not just links.
What this looks like across Ad Grants Pilot clients
We work with 40 nonprofits running Google Ad Grants, and what we see on the ground largely mirrors the article, with one important nuance. It isn’t uniform: for some clients, organic search traffic is actually increasing. For many others, it’s flat or slowly trailing off, which tracks with what the Times describes.
The exception worth flagging separately is a steep, sudden drop. That pattern usually signals something more fundamental happening on the site, technical issues, content gaps, indexing problems, rather than AI Overviews eating into traffic. If that’s what you’re seeing, an SEO and GEO (generative engine optimization) audit is the right next step, not a shrug at the news. The fixes tend to overlap: the technical and content changes that help a page rank in traditional search increasingly also make it easier for AI systems to find, parse, and cite that page.
Why Ad Grants is still one of the best levers available
This is a big part of why we push nonprofits toward Performance Max campaigns inside their Ad Grants account. PMAX places nonprofits in Google surfaces that a standard search campaign doesn’t reach, including AI Overviews, which matters if the goal is to stay visible to someone who may never leave Google’s ecosystem in the first place.
The results back this up. According to M+R Benchmarks, the average donations attributable to Ad Grants rose from $1,300 to $1,700/month last year, even as raw click volume dipped. Traffic quantity is trending down industry-wide, but traffic quality, engagement, and conversion have held steady or improved for organizations that adapt their strategy. Ad Grants remains very viable. It just requires the same kind of tuning any channel does when the underlying platform changes.
The bigger opportunity hiding in this shift
There’s a scenario worth watching: a future where AI companies pay to license original content for training and retrieval, the same way Wikipedia has already begun charging AI firms for access to its data. If that model spreads, organizations that hold original, well-documented content, research, records, first-person stories, aren’t just facing a traffic problem. They’re sitting on an asset AI systems actively want. That shift could turn what looks like a leak today into a new kind of value tomorrow, for organizations that document and structure their content well now.
What this means for your nonprofit
AI search is a genuine structural change, not a passing algorithm update, and it deserves to be taken seriously. But it’s one channel among several, not a replacement for the rest. The strongest approach right now is to optimize all channels in parallel: organic SEO, organic GEO, Google Ad Grants, Google paid search, and social search on platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Nonprofits showing up across all of these are best positioned to keep reaching supporters, regardless of how any single platform evolves.
Put your grant to work
Every eligible nonprofit can claim up to $10,000/month in free Google Ad Grants credit, but building and maintaining compliant campaigns takes real time and expertise, time most nonprofits don’t have to spare. Ad Grants Pilot makes it plug-and-play: your first search campaigns are built by the time you log in, our AI-powered campaign builder turns a landing page or keyword idea into a new ad group in seconds, and one-click conversion tracking gets Google Analytics set up correctly from day one. Ad Grants Pilot also supports Performance Max, letting you extend your grant beyond standard search campaigns into the placements, including AI Overviews, that matter most as search keeps shifting toward AI. Every campaign is built within Ad Grants compliance rules automatically, our customer success team is there for onboarding and ongoing support, and you’ll get plain-English email reports on performance as often as you’d like.
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About the author
Steven Aguiar is Founder and CEO of Ad Grants Pilot. He’s spent the last decade building Google Ad Grants and paid search programs for nonprofits, from small six-figure organizations to the American Heart Association, through his agency BlueWing, which serves 15+ nonprofit clients. He started Ad Grants Pilot to bring agency-grade Ad Grants management to nonprofits that don’t have agency-sized budgets.