Know How Your Nonprofit Shows Up in AI Chatbots: Pew's 4-Part Checklist

60% of U.S. adults read the AI summaries at the top of search engine results. Pew Research Center shared that figure, from a survey conducted February 17 to 23, 2026, in a new guide for nonprofit communicators.

The guide's message is simple. AI tools now sit between trusted information and the people looking for it. When someone looks up your issue, a chatbot may answer before your website does. Whether it mentions you, gets your facts right, or links back is worth knowing.

Pew turned that into a four-part checklist your team can work through together. Here's what it asks, and where to start.

Details

What Pew shared

Pew Research Center, which tracks how Americans view and use AI, published "Welcoming machines as audience: A guide for nonprofit communicators thinking about AI" on October 1, 2026. It collects the key takeaways from "From AI Insight to AI Impact," a ComNet 2026 session hosted by Claudia Deane, Executive Vice President, and Monica Anderson, Director, Internet and Technology Research, at Pew Research Center.

Accept, adapt, advance

Pew frames the shift from insight to impact in three moves:

• Accept. AI is here to stay, your audiences are using it, and it affects direct traffic to your site.
• Adapt. Test how your organization appears in AI engines, and experiment with making your current content more machine-readable.
• Advance. Bring what you learn into future content. You're now writing for humans and machines.

The usage trend behind it

The share of U.S. adults who say they've used ChatGPT rose from 18% in 2023 to 23% in 2024 and 34% in 2025. In 2026, Pew widened the question to include other chatbots, and the figure was 44%.

Why this matters for your nonprofit

The checklist splits naturally across a small team:

• Communications leads own the testing. Pew suggests assigning one owner to test periodically across commonly used platforms and models.
• Subject-matter experts judge whether each AI answer is current, accurate, and complete.
• Whoever manages your website handles the machine-readable fixes, from metadata to the text behind your charts.

How to get started

What you'll need

• One person who owns the testing and will repeat it over time
• Access to more than one AI platform, since Pew recommends running the same questions on several
• A subject matter expert who can review answers in your subject area
• A short list of questions people ask about your work

Pew's first checklist item is a conversation, not a test. Start there.

Steps

1. Decide what you want from AI tools. Talk through how AI discoverability supports your mission and communications goals. Decide whether you want AI systems to access and surface your work, and which topics, products, and audiences matter most. Pew suggests naming the outcome you want: accurate answers, clear attribution, and a path back to your organization.
2. Write 10 to 20 questions. Choose questions or prompts that should surface your expertise, research, or data.
3. Test them across several AI platforms. Run the same questions on each one. Record whether your organization is mentioned, cited, and linked.
4. Have your expert review the answers. Note the patterns: outdated information, weak attribution, missing links, and facts that never come up.
5. (Optional) Make your content easier for machines to read. Pew's ideas include publishing the numbers behind graphics as readable text, improving metadata so machines can identify things like subject, population, years covered, and authors, creating plain text versions of major reports, and auditing your site for anything a scraper might struggle to find.

Pew defines success in three parts: AI engines surface your information, represent it correctly, and send traffic back to you. Signals to watch include mentions, citations, AI crawler activity, and referral traffic.

Pro tip: Save your question list. Pew recommends repeating the test periodically, and asking the same questions each time to see what changed.

The bottom line

Pew doesn't put a price or a time estimate on this checklist. What it asks for is people: someone who owns the testing, an expert who checks the answers, and the habit of running the same questions again.

The bigger point is about mission. Your research and expertise only help when they reach the people who need them. If AI tools now sit between your work and the people looking for it, checking how those tools describe you is part of the job.

Next steps

• Download Pew's two-page guide and share it with your team
• Name an owner and draft your question list
• Run your first test on more than one AI platform
• Have an expert review the answers

Your audiences are already using AI. Make sure the answers they get lead back to you.

References

• Welcoming machines as audience: A guide for nonprofit communicators thinking about AI: Source article, Pew Research Center, October 1, 2026
• Welcoming Machines as Audience (PDF): Two-page version of the guide, with Pew's survey charts
• Pew Research Center: Publisher of the guide and the survey figures in this post
• ComNet 2026: The event where Claudia Deane and Monica Anderson presented these takeaways
• Pew Research Center's Artificial Intelligence topic page: Pew's research on how Americans view AI, including adoption, use, and concerns