135 – Turn AI Search Into More Donors, Partners, and Impact with Daniel Horowitz

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success podcast brought to you by wowdigital.com, your best place for non-profit websites and design, now including fractional CMO support.

Are you struggling to get your non-profit noticed online? Daniel Horowitz reveals how AI-driven SEO can help you reach more supporters, build trust, and amplify your impact without a big budget. So stay tuned, and let’s boost your visibility game.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. I’m your host, David. And in this episode, we’re going to be talking about SEO, AI-driven visibility, and building trust online with Daniel Horowitz. But before I continue, I want to mention that our podcast needs your help. If you find this episode or any of our others insightful, interesting, or helpful, please like, subscribe, share, and comment. It helps our podcast immensely.

Daniel’s SEO lead at Informatica, where he helps build scalable AI visibility systems. His work is all about using AI search, topical authority, and digital trust to elevate brand presence. He’s here today to show you how to apply the thinking to your own non-profit, even if you have limited resources.

Daniel, thank you so much for joining in on the show today.

Daniel Horowitz: Thanks, David. Excited to be here and dive into some of the AI-first search strategies that non-profits can use, even without having a huge budget or anything like that.

David Pisarek: Yeah, a couple of weeks ago, there was a group of agency owners that got together in Toronto, and we were having a conversation about SEO and AI. So I’m super excited about our conversation.

I want to hear what your thoughts are in terms of LLMs and how we could be found by them, so we can actually show up. And I know, and if anybody who’s watching or listening to this episode, if you look at your analytics, you’re probably from maybe the middle of 2025 until now have seen a drop in traffic to your website.

My take on that, and what we’ve been talking about with our clients, is: look, people have been, for the last more than a decade, going to Google, searching, and then clicking through, and landing on your page. Somewhere in the middle of 2025, Google implemented Gemini. And so what it’s doing is when you run a search, most of the time, not always, but most of the time, it’s showing an AI result above the ads, above everything.

So people are getting the information that they want without having to actually go and click through. So I’m really curious, what are your thoughts around that?

Daniel Horowitz: Yeah. So obviously, this is a huge disruption in search.

I would say for a lot of sites, especially at the enterprise level, but all the way down to smaller blogs and everything, traffic is down, maybe anywhere between 40 and 60% for most brands.

So this is a huge shift, right? And to your point with Gemini, which is our LLM, which powers their AI overviews, which, pretty much, is what this does: it summarizes, especially for top-of-funnel queries. So if people are searching for very high-level informational queries, they’re no longer clicking to websites at all.

And keep in mind, this has been happening for a while. Google has had a lot of zero-click things on their platforms, such as promoting YouTube, which is owned by Google or featured snippets. People also ask boxes.

So this direction had been happening for a while, but now it’s so dramatic that just having a top-of-funnel SEO strategy is no longer adequate.

David Pisarek: There are also other platforms. About two years ago, somewhere around that, I learned about Perplexity. I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this thing is totally amazing. It’s like ChatGPT, and Google had a cyborg baby kind of thing.’

I find myself for the last year and a half or so, and I stop myself. I’m like, ‘Why am I going to Google to search for this? I’m going to go into the AI platform, whether it’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, whatever your choice is, and do a search there because I can get the information without the ads, at least for now.’ I imagine at some point, they’re going to try to monetize that for anybody who’s on a free plan.

But it’s not just Google; it’s everything across the board.

Daniel Horowitz: Absolutely. Yeah, there’s a huge shift. Google used to have, I think, over 90% market share. It’s still extremely dominant. I think it’s between… I’ve seen a bunch of studies between 80% to 85% search market share. So it’s still very high.

You should still ultimately be driving a Google search, a Google-first strategy. But yeah, there are platforms like Perplexity. ChatGPT, I would say, is by far the most used. But people are now going to these platforms. It’s much harder to track what’s happening now.

There’s not the equivalent of, say, you track a keyword, you use your favourite keyword tool, let’s say, SEMrush or Ahrefs or what now. You get a search volume, you get an approximate difficulty of how much it’s to rank, you write some articles, you do some outreach to some websites, you build some links, you make sure that’s linked well in your website with technical SEO.

There was a very clear framework of how to succeed with search. Now it’s like the Wild Wild West. No one 100% knows how these LLMs work and how they derive information. So, at least at Informatica, when I work with clients, and everything, a big thing is just trying to show up in as many different places as possible and really doubling on topical authority, which topical authority is pretty much just becoming a subject matter expert on a particular topic.

What you would do is take… If your non-profit specializes in something specific, for example, you would take that topic, break it down into a bunch of subtopics, and cover it from all different angles, and this is how you build that authority.

An LLM will look at your non-profit and say, ‘Hey, oh, wow, these guys are experts in this.’ So then those articles, as long as they’re all linked together in a logical way on your website, you’re more likely to rank well in Google, of course, but also for LLMs, they’re more likely to cite you as a subject matter expert.  That’s really the genesis of that. But you have to look at it in terms of content writing isn’t free. You have to get good writers, of course. So it’s not always the cheapest strategy.

But if you have members of your team, for example, that are truly experts of the subject, you could build out their expertise, make sure, say, their LinkedIn or social profiles, they are building external credibility, and they are the authors of the articles? That’ll all lead into that.

David Pisarek: Okay. So let’s take a step back, because that was like a super information dump the first, I don’t know, three minutes of episode here.

Non-profits who are listening to this, or any mission-driven organization, really, how can they build visibility if they don’t have large budgets? I know, for example, a lot of people are talking about: they’ll go to ChatGPT, and they’ll say, ‘write an article on this,’ and they’ll copy and paste it.

I’m like, no, no, no, no, you can use it as a foundation, you can use it for brainstorming, but there are watermarks in the content, stuff like that. But taking that aside, what do you see as the path forward for non-profits to even get started?

Daniel Horowitz: I think the first step in getting started is actually getting some level of external coverage. It doesn’t mean you have to pay.

If you work with, let’s say, there are partners you work with, there are other organizations you work with, let’s say, you had someone speak at a conference, for example, getting links back from those external sources. All that requires is an outreach email. It doesn’t really cost anything.

Building that external authority is really the first step.

David Pisarek: Backlinks are huge. It shows authority.

There’s something called DA, Domain Authority, and that’s one of the ranking factors that Google and I imagine the LLMs are using as well to help provide context and relevancy in terms of the results.

One of the things that we know is part of the factor, at least in Google, is domain authority. If you can get links coming to you from these other sources, as long as they don’t have the no-referrer tag on them, right? That’s going to help build your authority and grow your domain, your DA, to a level that Google goes, ‘Oh, this is a trusted resource.’

Daniel Horowitz: Definitely. Yeah. And like I said, those are not necessarily links you have to pay for. Reach out to people you’re already working with and get those backlinks.

If there are industry-relevant publications, for example, you could pitch a guest post or something like that. Then, for the backlink, I’m sure either you or some member of your staff has the expertise to write something like that.

So don’t worry about… This doesn’t necessarily have to cost any money. This is how you build that external credibility so that when you go this top-level authority route, you’re already starting to be a trusted resource.

David Pisarek: Exactly. Maybe you’re a member of an association. That would be a great place to start. If you’re already paying membership, maybe there’s a members listing, you can get a backlink, and you can produce some content.

I know as a business owner, when we go out, and we work with non-profit and charities, right? When we go out and reach out to these places, they’re like, ‘Oh, thank goodness. We were struggling. What are we putting in our newsletter next week? Thank you so much for creating this article. That we can actually publish,’ and it’s saving them some time as well.

So I think there’s a bit of a win-win there for sure.

Daniel Horowitz: Absolutely. And even better, if the content you’re providing has original insights in it, that’s the big problem with writing with ChatGPT. It only knows what it knows, right? So it can’t create new information. It can just remix information that already exists.

So, as a non-profit owner or employee, you probably have unique expert insights that can’t come from an LLM.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. Okay. So moments ago, I was like, ‘No, no, no, no, you can’t use ChatGPT and just post content.’ That is a huge mistake for organizations. And I think there’s a lot that are probably unknowingly sabotaging their reach.

What are some common SEO or web strategy mistakes that you see non-profits making when it comes to trying to increase their visibility?

Daniel Horowitz: To your point, with content, I would say not structuring your content properly, especially for LLMs. It’s very important to have a clear hierarchy of structure, clear heading twos, clear heading threes, and sometimes even heading fours.

Think of it, when LLMs are pulling information, they’re sighting it, Google as well, actually, they’re looking for smaller snippets, so you need to structure it in a logical hierarchy. No one wants to read your huge essay. It needs to be structured properly, have proper headings, title tags, etc.

I would say that the on-page SEO element is really important. This is something where you certainly don’t have to pay an SEO consultant or something. You could easily learn on your own, just with maybe a keyword research tool. Hey, you can ask ChatGPT, add a structure or an article. That’s fine. Use it as a thought partner as long as it’s not literally writing it.

David Pisarek: Exactly. And one of the things that I found myself doing over the last probably three or four years is going to Google, going to YouTube, wherever, and asking a question like, ‘How do I fix this leaky drain?’ Thinking about our bathroom, whatever. I’ve caught myself doing this, which means other people are going and doing this, too.

One of the things in terms of structured content is having schema markup in your content. So think like an FAQ, being able to properly code it so that the LLMs go, ‘Oh, okay, this is FAQ. These are questions. Let’s load this in and save it in our memory in this place. So when somebody comes and starts asking questions.’

And the other side to that is if you’re looking at your analytics, and you know why people are coming to your website, what content is resonating, what’s getting the most views, what are the keywords that people are looking for? What are the questions related to those keywords, and start creating content that answers those questions, because then you’ll be a more exact match to a search and likely come up as more relevant.

Daniel Horowitz: Yeah. David, I really want to touch on both your points there, but the second one, especially with using your own first-party data to find what questions.

So I would highly recommend that people have Google Search Console and sign up for this. This is a free thing from Google. It does not require any specialized skill or any serious SEO experience to use, but pretty much this connects with your website. It’ll tell you your clicks, of course, but also your impression data.

Your impression data is a gold mine for what Google already sees you as relevant for. So these are where those questions you were talking about will come up.

So let’s say you have a few articles on your website, a few blogs, but they’re not ranking well, they’re not getting a lot of visibility, but you can see, ‘Oh, wow, even though nobody clicked, this got 300 impressions for a very specific question. Well, great. That should be my next piece of content, right? That’s my subtopic.’

That can link into the main topic, created as a new blog or article, and then you link those together. That’s topical authority. You’re using your data that already exists build on itself.

To your other point about the FAQs, this is becoming huge with LLMs. Honestly, I recommend putting them at the end of any blog or article now. Take maybe four, maybe even five key points from the article and just create highly specific FAQs that you’re using your own expertise to answer.

David Pisarek: This is one of the things that you can leverage AI to help you with. You can load the article that you’ve written in and go, ‘What are the four, five, six main questions out of this?’

Get the questions, manipulate them a little bit, make them your own, and then fill them out and build out the schema. You can use AI to create the schema markup for you, so you can throw it in.

You don’t have to spend the time doing that, or you can work with a partner like Daniel or myself to come up with a template for you that you can actually just implement over and over and over and just reuse and repurpose.

I think there’s definitely lots of opportunity there, at really low cost, to help improve how you show up in the technology that people are using.

Daniel Horowitz: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, LLMs, especially ChatGPT, if you use that for work or Claude, these are the best at summarizing information. If you could summarize information, if you could synthesize information, yeah, loading the article up, just asking it questions about the article, that’s the way to go.

David Pisarek: You’ve worked in the enterprise world, and usually non-profits and educational organizations are maybe 8 to 10 years behind what I’m going to say, the times. They don’t need to be.

I’m curious, what are some of the lessons or tactics that you’ve got from enterprise land that could be scaled down to small or mid-sized non-profits?

Daniel Horowitz: I think just building a brand. I know that’s generic advice, but the other way to think about it is that building a brand is really all about, like we were talking about, the backlinks.

Naturally, what does a brand do? Well, they naturally get mentions on the internet. They’re naturally cited. Doing all the work to truly build a brand and be visible online.

Sure, if you’re a big company, you have more resources. Maybe you have a PR department. Maybe you’re nationally, our CEO maybe goes on MSNBC to talk about cloud data management or something like that. As a non-profit, that’s obviously not an option.

But hey, you’re working with people, right? You have partnerships. You’ve probably presented at conferences or things like that. These are all foundational stuff. So whether you’re Microsoft or you just started your non-profit a month ago, you still have people you know, right? You still have a network.

David Pisarek: I love that idea of

Going out, reaching out to your network, working with strategic partners, maybe in the non-profit space, but also look outside, look for corporate partnerships that you can engage with, where maybe you can get in-kind service.

They can help you with some content or come and volunteer, make a donation, whatever that side of stuff. My opinion is strategic planning and strategic organization, and doing annual strategic planning. I think a lot of non-profits do that anyway. But where they fail is that a lot of them don’t do quarterly strategic planning.

What is the focus that we need to work on in the next 90 days for us to get closer to our year goal, to our five-year goal, our 10-year goal, our mission, etc.? And I think that’s where a lot of organizations are actually struggling with, because they don’t spend the time with that strategy piece, because they’re just too busy focusing and working towards all the fires that they have to put out and all the emergencies that come up.

And if anybody is interested in quarterly strategic planning, a little plug here, that is something that we do for our clients. So give us a call, reach out, shoot us an email, whatever. We can work with you on the quarterly strat planning. It’s about a two-hour session once a quarter. So if you can’t figure out two hours once a quarter to sit down. If you don’t want to hire us, I do have also a… Where is it here? I’ve got it sitting on my desktop, a PDF that I can send you as a quarterly worksheet to go through.

All right, we did talk about AI and how it’s changing search super, super fast. I was at a conference about a year and a half ago in New York, and everybody was talking about AI, and we had an expert in AI come who builds out AI-integrated platforms and stuff like that. She was talking about how AI hallucinates. That’s the word that she used.

AI, for everybody out there, has been built to be nice to us, to agree with us, to give us the information that we want, even if it means that it has to make up a bunch of garbage to help us out.

So what are your thoughts in terms of how people can navigate around that and ensure whatever they’re asking for is actually real?

Daniel Horowitz: You have to be aware of the fact that it glazes you. I think that’s the biggest thing.

So, there was an episode of South Park recently where one of the characters was locking the other character using ChatGPT, and they were like, ‘Create me a business where we can turn French fries into salad.’ ChatGPT was just like, ‘Oh, my God, this is a brilliant idea, blah, blah, blah.’ Clearly, it’s not, right? So I think you have to check your ego at the door when you’re using this and realize that this is happening. It’s going to agree with you.

So you can look at the information and say, ‘Wow, this is really bad. I would never do this,’ as opposed to just because it’s saying that this is a good idea, if you throw something out there, you have to be aware of that.

So if you said, ‘Oh, I would love to paint my house green.’ And it’s like, ‘Oh, my God, green is such a great colour.’ and you’re like, ‘Actually, you know what? I’m thinking blue.’ ‘Actually, you’re right. Blue is so much better, blah, blah, blah.’

So you just have to know what it’s doing, how it’s structured. It’s a tool. It has good and bad. That’s a big reason why you don’t necessarily want to use it for just straight-up content, unedited content writing.

It’s a tool. It has certain biases as well. If you asked it about, let’s say, you asked a question about Georgia, it would assume Georgia the state, not Georgia, the country, because it has biases that are built into it as well.

So I think you have to be aware of all of this, the glazing, the bias, the overall ethics. And to your point with the AI expert, the hallucinations, too. I think they’ve improved it over time, but it still will hallucinate maybe 10%, 15% of the time.

So you have to be aware that sometimes the facts that will make up or are straight up wrong. And if there’s something that seems off to you, you might want to validate that. It’s not your single source of truth.

David Pisarek: For years, we’ve been saying, you’ve probably been saying this, too, you can’t trust everything that you see online. Anybody can go, and make a web page, and post it up there, and go, ‘Look, it’s true. It’s online. So it must be true.’ No, that’s not the case.

And that’s the same with literature as well. For millennia, people can make a book, publish it, and put it out there, and people can believe it.

So we need to understand and have in our mindset that what we’re getting may or may not be accurate.

If it’s sighting statistics for you, I need a statistic that talks about in the northeastern United States, what percentage of children are malnourished? Ask it for the sources, and then go, and follow through and see if it’s legitimate.

You can definitely use it as a research tool, but you have to spend your own time also to validate. Not everything is 100% truthful when it comes through.

You also want to look at the source that it came from. If it’s a page that I made and I called it Dr. David and had some home remedy for something versus a trusted medical journal, I would go with the trusted medical journal over something that I’ve put up.

Daniel Horowitz: Definitely. Yeah. And to your point about checking the sources, a lot of times ChatGPT will surface things that never would have been surfaced on Google or Perplexity.

So, not to say these are bad. Maybe these were hidden gems that weren’t getting the visibility due to a lack of, let’s say, brand building or things like that. But it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right.

Yeah, you’ve got to validate it. You’ve got to click through. Actually, they say that’s the most common reason that people click through links on ChatGPT is to validate.

David Pisarek: Okay, so we talked about the importance of brand, the importance of creating really good content. We did just talk about truthful and honest versus I’m not going to deceptive isn’t the right word, but made up information.

What does this mean for organizations? How can they make sure that they’re showing up as a trusted resource in these platforms that are basically scraping their content and serving it?

Daniel Horowitz: Yeah, I would say the biggest thing is, of course, as we discussed, building those authoritative backlinks to start, especially if you’re a newer non-profit, you probably don’t have much of a web presence. Build up your social Google channels, things like that.

You want to appear as though a normal brand on the website. Any company would have, say, a YouTube channel. It doesn’t matter if you only put out one or two videos. It’s not the point. It’s just to have it so that AI crawlers crawl and make sure that YouTube channel or TikTok channel or whatever it is is linked back into your homepage to your website as well.

So you want to appear to be, or not just appear to be, but you want to be a legitimate brand online.

On top of that, have some articles out, have some things that can be cited on your website. Try to, ideally, throw out some original thought, not just regurgitating other information that’s online.

And then finally, as we discussed, structuring your content in a way. Make sure to have clear headings and a hierarchy of information, and a strong internal linking strategy. So, making sure that your blogs or articles are linked back into other blogs or articles, making sure that any resource pages or call-to-action pages are linked in properly, etc.

David Pisarek: I love that idea.

Internal linking is just as important as those backlinks from external websites. It helps with content discoverability, but it also helps with the user’s experience when and if they get to that page, where they can see other similar content relatively easily, and click through, and get more insight and details there.

I do think that it is important that organizations and businesses, whoever you are, that you are producing content on a regular, consistent schedule.

For anybody that’s watching this on the wall behind me over here, I have the content schedule that we use. We sit down once a year and we plan out for the entirety of the year, what is all the content that we’re going to produce. And then we put it on the top half. And then, month by month, we take it off, and we put it on the bottom half. I feel like I’m telling the weather.

The board behind me is actually mostly for show. We do this all digitally now, but that’s the general idea. You can sit down for an hour, do some brainstorming, come up with 40 pieces of content, organize it in a way, and then you’ve got your content schedule.

I’m curious, Daniel, from your perspective, how often should organizations be publishing content on their own site versus social media and that type of thing?

Daniel Horowitz: I mean, it depends on the resource. I could tell you what’s ideal: weekly or something. Is that realistic for a small starting organization? Definitely not. Even at Informatica, sometimes we struggle to do weekly at more big company. I would say at least once a month, if you can.

Really just pick one topic and really drill down on that topic that’s highly relevant to whatever you’re specializing in, as opposed to just going broader and creating things like what is content. Don’t regurgitate information. Really try to drill down on original information.

Even if it doesn’t get the same level of clicks, look, you’re not a publication, right? You don’t thrive on the sheer volume of clicks. That’s a vanity metric. You want to make sure those clicks are highly relevant, that that visibility is highly relevant. So, that would be my advice, from a content strategy perspective: you know, plan out a year and plan 12, maybe 15 articles that really drill down on a single topic, and then you’ll become an expert.

David Pisarek: That’s that idea. To take that one step further, you can create what we call pillar content, so really deep content like what Daniel is talking about.

You can take that, chunk it into smaller pieces, and use those chunks for social posts. You can use those in email newsletter. You can use those across multiple different mediums without having to be fresh and new. You can take a quote from it, use it here, create a nice graphic, and there’s your social post for the week, or the day, or however often.

Daniel Horowitz: Yeah, exactly. Think of it as like you’re creating an interconnected ecosystem. You can draw things from other things, and then it’s connected and related.

And that’s the whole point of building topical authority is that you’re really an expert on this topic. So the more you’re posting about it, the more that you’re sharing information about it, the more you’re going to be recognized as an expert.

David Pisarek: Love it. Okay. So everybody that has been listening to this episode, they are creating content. It’s original content. It’s long form. They’ve got backlinks coming in. They’ve got internal links in their own website. They’re putting some stuff out on social to try to drive some traffic awareness, brand awareness, that thing. They’re showing up in AI search.

You did talk briefly about GSC, Google Search Console. We could talk about Universal Analytics 3 versus Google Analytics 4. If you use UA3, you need to update. For the last, when was it? June 2024? I think it stopped. It’s been well over a year and a half.

How can organizations actually measure success? You did touch on this a little bit. It’s not the number of clicks, but the meaningful clicks. Aside from clicks and keyword rankings, how can they measure digital impact that reflects their mission and goals?

Daniel Horowitz: I would say, ideally, conversions, right? I mean, that’s ultimately the point of all this, to get people to be contacting you, to build partnerships, things like that. I mean, that’s why you build an online presence. You’re not, at the end of the day, you’re not a publication, you’re not selling ads or affiliate links.

The goal is not to just get as many clicks as possible, but it’s to create conversions.

So whether that happens off the… It’s harder to track today than ever, right? Often, that could happen where someone’s doing, say, research in Perplexity or ChatGPT, and they’re using 10 different prompts, and they’re having a whole conversation, and it’s not something you can track.

But even at Informatica, we’ve noticed our conversion rate from LLMs has grown, I think, like 5X in the last year. So it’s not a huge percentage of our overall conversion rate, but it’s much higher than it was a year ago. I mean, five times as higher.

So things like that. Try to measure the conversion rate and create goals on your specific pages. Let’s say it’s a form fill, a download, or something.

Another thing is, if you have any gated content, make sure to ungated a summary at least. So you could still get the download for lead capture, but make sure that it’s not just a pure landing page, that it has actual information on it. These are all important things, right? We need to make sure that our web presence is actually helping us drive business.

David Pisarek: Daniel, amazing thoughts around SEO, visibility, content, and AI. We could probably talk about this at nauseam. We could probably have an entire podcast daily just going through all of this stuff.

So thank you so much. I hope that the folks listening to the show have been able to get some really great advice and some pointers from our conversation.

I like to put our guests in the hot seat a little bit right here at the end. So if you were to issue a challenge to anybody listening to this episode, something you want them to do in the next 24 hours after listening, what would that challenge be?

Daniel Horowitz: Okay, this is going to be a two-fold challenge, actually. So I want you to build a pitch list: an hour each, listing everyone in your network and everyone you’re working with, with their emails and names. Put it in a spreadsheet, and start outreaching to them for backlinks.

And then on the same token, start to create a topical authority strategy. Build a topical map. Go into your Google search console data like we’ve discussed. Find questions that people are actually asking that are relevant to your niche and build a topical map based on that.

You have the impression data to guide you. Build out ideas for… You don’t need to create full outlines or anything like that. But even just the topics for, let’s say, 12 to 15 blogs or articles like we’ve discussed.

David Pisarek: Love it. All right. So if anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Daniel Horowitz: So You could just find me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/danielhorowitzseo. I shared insights daily about AI search, the direction that everything’s going. Yeah, we’d be really excited to connect with you there.

David Pisarek: Fantastic. So, Daniel, again, thank you so much for joining in on this show. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success podcast.

Everybody listening, if you want any of the information, the resources, the link to Daniel’s LinkedIn, just head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details.

Until next time, keep on being successful!