Hi friends 👋🏻

Have you wondered (or been asked) whether it makes sense to invest in a website in this age of AI tools and declining website traffic?

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Why invest in our website?

I offer a training about how to develop an effective nonprofit website, and this week I’m updating the training materials. One update I’m making is in response to this kind of question:

“Why should we invest time and money in our website now that everyone’s using AI tools and our website traffic has dropped?”

It’s a good question.

• AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT don’t send many clicks to websites. They answer basic informational queries within the tool.
• Google search is similar. Lots of searches are answered right on the search results page, with an AI overview or Google’s knowledge panel.
• And we all know social media platforms penalize posts with links, and are designed to keep users on the platform, scrolling.

Taken together, this adds up to a landscape where website visits are declining and it seems like a lot of your audience’s “interactions” with your digital content is not happening on your website.

So why make the investment?

(I’ve been helped along in my thinking here by Rand Fishkin’s content about zero-click marketing – check out a recent video on this topic here.)

Your website is the authoritative source that you control

When your audience learns about your organization on other platforms – AI tools, Google search, etc. – that information still has to come from somewhere.

Google has been scraping the web for years, and AI platforms are now doing it too.

These platforms are designed to present accurate information, but they have to be able to find it. This is argument number one for maintaining an robust, modern website full of accurate information: your website serves as the authoritative source of information that your organization controls.

Every other place on the web that AI tools or Google could scrape for information about your organization could be wrong, or at least out of date. But you control your website. Don’t cede your organization’s public face to platforms you can’t control.

Your website is your content hub

Your website is also the place where you can gather and present all the content your organization has produced. Articles, resources, video: these should all be gathered together and either hosted, or at least linked to, from your website.

Then let all the other platforms serve as places where that content is distributed, and where conversation happens about your content.

Your website is where your brand lives

Your website is the only place online where you fully control the branding and user experience.

You don’t get to control the user experience on Instagram or Facebook or in the Google search results, and you definitely don’t control the user experience in AI tools. At best, your logo might be displayed and you get to upload graphics that match your brand identity.

But on your website, you can control the brand. Your organization gets to show up in the way you have chosen, not just visually but in your voice, the level of accessibility you ensure for users, and the interaction pathways you build for visitors. You get to be creative on your own website in a way that all those other platforms don’t allow.

Your website is where the conversions happen

And most importantly, your website is still where the conversions happen.

These are the actions that you want audience members to take.

Your entire digital ecosystem, across all these platforms, is designed to lead users to donate, to sign up to volunteer, to call their member of Congress, or register for an event.

Those actions still happen on your website, so while you may get less traffic overall, the visits you do get are the important ones. This means optimizing your website for those highest-priority user actions is more important than ever.

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