SEO and GEO work better together, not as a trade-off

SEO helps charities, NGOs and healthcare providers get found for high-intent queries like donations, referrals, services and memberships. GEO helps your content get summarised and cited in AI answers. They are not competing strategies. One plan can do both by improving technical health, using clear headings, adding answer-first blocks, and making trust signals easy to verify.

We keep hearing the same “either/or” in charity, NGO and healthcare marketing: Do we back SEO, or do we switch to GEO because AI is taking over?

That’s the wrong question. Search has not disappeared. AI answers have not replaced the web. What’s changed is the interface, and the bar for being seen. So we run one plan that wins both rankings and citations.

The uncomfortable bit: being ranked is no longer the same as being visible

A few numbers that should sharpen priorities:

Nearly 60% of Google searches end without a click to an external website (US and EU clickstream data).
Some industry analyses suggest mobile “no-click” behaviour can be even higher (around 77%), depending on how it’s measured.
AI Overviews are now showing up at meaningful scale. One dataset found them in 27.5% of tracked SERPs by Nov 2025.
Pew’s research also found 18% of Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI summary.
Where AI Overviews appear, studies show click-through rates drop materially (Ahrefs reported ~34.5% lower CTR for top results when AI Overviews were present).
ChatGPT holds roughly 80% of global AI chatbot market share (Dec 2025).
And here’s the kicker: only ~12% of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot also rank in Google’s top 10 for the equivalent query.

Translation for mission-led teams: you can do “good SEO”, rank well, and still be absent from the answer people actually read.

What SEO still does for you (and why we’d never drop it)

SEO is how you show up when people are actively looking for help, reassurance, eligibility, or ways to support:

“mental health support near me”
“how to set up a monthly donation”
“charity fundraising pack template”
“referral pathway for [service]”
“volunteer opportunities in [location]”

And it’s not academic. Donation journeys are won and lost on the basics.

Benchmarks often show around 1.5% of website visitors donate, and desktop still drives a bigger share of donation revenue than mobile.
The same benchmark set reports average gifts around $145 on desktop vs $76 on mobile.
Monthly giving matters more every year. Monthly gifts accounted for 31% of all online revenue in 2024 (M+R Benchmarks).

If your Donate, Refer, Get Help, or Membership pages are slow, confusing, or hard to crawl, you do not just lose traffic. You lose intent.

Speed is a real lever:

Google’s research found that when sites meet Core Web Vitals thresholds, users are 24% less likely to abandon a page load.
Deloitte’s “Milliseconds Make Millions” work found that a 0.1s improvement in mobile site speed correlated with conversion gains (8.4% for retail in that study). Your donation funnel is not magically immune to impatience.

What GEO adds (and why it’s not a separate playbook)

GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the work that makes your content usable to answer engines. Not “longer”. Not “more blogs”. More extractable.

This is where NGOs, charities and healthcare providers are already being judged, whether you asked for it or not:

“Which organisations support people with X in the UK?”
“What are the signs of Y and where can I get help?”
“Is this service self-referral or GP referral?”
“Which charities are most trusted for Z?”
“How do I start a monthly donation and can I cancel it?”

If an AI answer appears and your organisation is not mentioned, you are not “second”. You are not in the set.

Also, the sources AI cites are not a neat copy of Google’s top results, which is why GEO has to be intentional.

If you’re doing neither SEO nor GEO, you’re paying for it (somewhere)

This is the bit we see most often in stretched teams:

Paid campaigns become the only way to create spikes, then everything goes quiet.
Your helpline or service pages exist, but they do not show up when people need them.
Fundraising content gets shared internally, but never compounds in search.
Comms teams end up doing the explaining one-to-one because the website is not doing it at scale.

And while email is still a major driver (for example, one survey found 33% of donors say email inspires them most, with social next), you still need people to find the page where the action happens.

The overlap is the point: GEO is mostly “SEO that’s easy to quote”

Here’s the practical reality. The fastest GEO gains usually come from strengthening SEO foundations, then packaging your content so machines can lift it cleanly.

We focus on four moves:

Fix the pages that create outcomes
Donate (one-off and monthly), Get Help, Referrals, Membership, Corporate Partnerships, Volunteer.
Add “quote-ready” blocks to priority pages
- a 40-60 word answer-first summary
- 2 short FAQs that remove friction
- a clear next step (donate, refer, self-refer, enquire, sign up)
Write in clusters that match real decision-making
What it is. Who it’s for. Eligibility. How to access support. What happens next. How to help.
Make credibility easy to verify
Who wrote it, when it was updated, what evidence it uses, and where the boundaries are. In health and social care, that is not “nice to have”. It’s how you stay citable.

A tiny behavioural science nod, used sparingly: under cognitive load, people (and machines) default to the simplest credible option. If your page is hard to parse, it is less likely to be chosen.

Bottom line

SEO gets you discovered. GEO gets you chosen when the interface becomes the answer. The work overlaps heavily, which is exactly why treating them as a trade-off is such an expensive myth.

FAQs

Is GEO replacing SEO for charities and healthcare providers?

No. Search still drives discovery for services, referrals, volunteering, memberships and donations. What’s changed is that many journeys now end on the results page or inside AI summaries. GEO extends your visibility into those answer interfaces, but it relies on solid SEO foundations.

What’s the quickest win if we’re short on time?

Start with your highest-intent pages (Donate, Get Help, Referrals, Membership). Make them fast and crawlable, add a 40–60 word answer-first block at the top, include two plain-English FAQs, and make the CTA unmissable. Then internally link to those pages from relevant guidance content.

If you want one plan that improves rankings and increases your chances of being cited in AI answers, we can run a combined SEO + GEO audit across your donation, service, referral and membership journeys, then give you a prioritised fix list your team can act on.

Author information

With 15 years of hands-on SEO and digital marketing experience, agency director Ash is the driving element behind our digital team. Ashley heads our digital execution team, delivering innovative strategic and tactical marketing initiatives and campaigns; helping propel our clients’ growth and success.