Your charity might be a household name but when someone turns to ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews looking for help, you might not appear.
We’ve just released a report called The Invisible Charity where we’ve analysed the 15 most well-known UK charities and see how they appear in AI-powered search platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity.
What we discovered
British Heart Foundation is doing the best. They appear in over 70% of relevant AI search results across all three platforms. But some household-name charities barely register at all.
We also found three clear patterns that separate the charities that win in AI search from those that don’t.
First, focus wins. Charities that are experts in one area dominate. Charities with broad remits struggle because their authority gets diluted across too many topics.
Second, charity size doesn’t matter as much as you’d think. AI platforms cite dozens of sources in a single answer. Smaller, specialist charities can compete effectively by being genuinely expert in their corner.
Third, the technical foundations matter. Many charities keep all their research locked in PDFs or JavaScript-heavy pages that AI crawlers can’t read. This renders important work invisible to both people and search systems.
The full report includes specific recommendations tailored to each charity we looked at and insights that apply to charities of all sizes.
Download The Invisible Charity to find out more.