Attention is the fight. We help you win it.
Charities compete with retailers, marketplaces and each other for the same searches. Only 37% of the top UK charity searches show an AI answer, so the classic results and the map pack still decide who gets found. We have grown visibility for the National Garden Scheme and GamCare.
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Charities in search, right now
Of the 60 highest-volume UK charity searches we checked, 22 show a Google AI Overview, 18 show a map pack and 3 show ads. The searches with the most money behind them are also the hardest: “donate to charity” has a difficulty score of 69 and “gambling addiction help” scores 90, because national services and government pages hold them. The volume is in jobs, shops and volunteering, which are local and practical. Charity search is still decided by classic rankings and local presence more than by AI.
Method: eight seed phrases per sector expanded in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer (UK), the 60 highest-volume matching terms kept, SERP features counted per term. Pulled November 2026.
How charity search got here
Charities came to search late and with small teams, so each update tended to catch them out. Here is what each one changed.
| Year | Google update | What it meant for charity |
|---|---|---|
| 2011 | Panda | Charity sites built on thin news and event pages lost visibility. |
| 2012 | Penguin | Directory and reciprocal links that charities had relied on stopped counting, and some became penalties. |
| 2013 | Hummingbird | “How can I help” and “where can I volunteer” began to be answered as questions. |
| 2014 | Pigeon | Local results became central. Charity shops and local services started to live or die in the map pack. |
| 2015 | Mobile-friendly update | Donation journeys that did not work on phones were demoted and lost gifts. |
| 2018 | Medic core update | Health and support charities were held to a higher standard of expertise and trust. |
| 2022 | Helpful content update | Pages written to rank for awareness-day terms rather than to help lost ground. |
| 2024 | AI Overviews (UK, August) | AI answers appeared on practical questions, but by November 2026 only 37% of top charity searches carry one. |
| 2025 | AI Mode | Conversational search for support and giving. Charities that state what they do, where and for whom in plain terms are the ones cited. |
How we work
Technical SEO is the foundation of everything online, and it’s what we’re best at: every one of us has well over ten years of pure technical SEO behind them. We find your problems fast and tell you exactly what to do about them, in order.
What we bring
Award-winning technical SEO is the core. Around it: the strategy to beat your competitors, a group with more than 30 developers to build what we find, membership of the GlobalCom PR Network and contacts in international radio for the stories that earn links, Google Partner status for paid search alongside the organic work, and our own tech that pulls all of your data into one place and makes sense of it.
The evidence
Two charity clients, with the numbers their case studies prove.
Questions charity clients ask
Straight answers before you book a call.
Usually the practical searches: shops, volunteering, events and the services you run, which are local and high in volume. Then the support and giving pages, where trust and clarity decide.