Hi friends 👋🏻

This week, my reaction to an alarming headline in my inbox about nonprofit website traffic.

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Nonprofit website traffic tanking?

Yesterday I saw this headline in my inbox from Nonprofit Newsfeed:

"New Search Data Show Why Nonprofit Traffic is Screwed"

This isn't wrong, and it isn't a unique trend to nonprofit websites. As generative AI components continue to roll out in search results, fewer searchers leave the search results page, particularly for low complexity search queries.

This reflects the trend across the web – platforms that offer "free" experiences (search engines, social media sites) don't want you to leave.

However, I want to suggest a different, more nuanced response to this trend.

What type of traffic is declining (and what isn't)?

The searches where Google is most likely to be able to meet the user's need right on the search results page are simple, informational queries. In those cases, we've all seen Google's AI answers (and even featured snippets before that) do a fairly good job answering basic questions.

So if you have invested heavily in a content strategy designed to attract traffic by answering simple questions in blog posts, yes, you're likely to lose much of that traffic.

At the other end of the spectrum, you're unlikely to lose brand searches. If someone types your organization name into Google, they're likely just using Google to get to your organization's website. That's unlikely to change.

You might see traffic from simple informational search queries going down, but if you're doing things right, I'd hope you'll see traffic from brand search queries stay steady or even increase.

Is "website traffic" a helpful metric?

My short answer: overall website traffic is probably not a helpful metric.

The most important website analytics metrics are more tightly focused on the conversion actions that matter to your organization:

• Donations
• Membership sign-ups
• Resource downloads
• Event registrations
• Ticket purchases
• Program use

Overall traffic feels like a vanity metric in 2025.

A traffic decline is only worrying if you can show a corresponding drop in conversion activities.

To back me up here, watch this short video from Rand Fishkin. Rand has watched the past decade of changes in the web landscape closely, going from CEO of a leading SEO tool to a small audience research platform today.

Where to focus instead?

In the "2025" column of Rand's visual, he suggests that our top-of-funnel" activity should be focused on building impressions, reach, and engagements AWAY from your website. That means social platforms, communities, podcasts ... places where your audience naturally hangs out.

As your organization (or representatives of your organization) builds a profile and trust in those spaces, you should see branded searches for your organization or leaders increase. This corresponds to fewer, but higher converting, website visits.

The challenge: if you can navigate this transition well, overall website traffic might decline, but conversion rates will not.

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I'd love to hear about your experiences. Are you seeing across the board website traffic declines over the past 12 months? How are you responding?

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