Be the organization assistants point people to.
People ask assistants where to find a food pantry open Saturday, where to donate a couch and how to volunteer this weekend. Speak Local shows whether your organization is the one they’re pointed to, and what to fix when it isn’t.
Free, in under a minute, no email or card. It grades up to 25 pages across Local, SEO, AEO and GEO.
How does a nonprofit get recommended by AI assistants and Google?
By making its services, hours, location and eligibility easy to find and identical everywhere, so an assistant can send people to you with confidence. Keep a Google Business Profile current, give each program its own page, publish events and needs as they happen, and mark the organization up as an NGO with its nonprofitStatus. Your profiles on charity evaluators such as Candid and Charity Navigator are among the pages an assistant can read about you, so keep them consistent too.
Updated 12 October 2026
What do people ask before they reach out?
Questions come from people looking for help, people offering it and people checking before they give. These six are worth tracking:
- Food pantry open Saturday near me
- Where can I donate furniture in your city?
- Volunteer opportunities near me this weekend
- Is your organization a legitimate charity?
- Free tax help near me
- Best animal shelter to adopt a dog in your city
These are examples to adapt. Put the ones that bring you business to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini on a weekly or monthly round, and each answer is recorded as named, cited or absent, with whoever was named in your place. How AI answers are tracked
What do Google and AI assistants weigh for a nonprofit?
They weigh how easy you are to find and to trust, and whether what they’d tell someone about you is still true.
Services, hours and eligibility spelled out
Who you serve, when, where, and what someone needs to bring. Someone asking for help needs a straight answer, and an assistant can only give one if your pages state it. A PDF flyer is a weaker source than a page.
A profile that’s kept current
Hours change with volunteers and seasons. A Business Profile still showing summer hours in December sends people to a locked door, and that is exactly the detail an assistant repeats.
Proof you’re legitimate
Your nonprofit status, your Candid (GuideStar) and Charity Navigator profiles, your annual report and the people who run you, all consistent. “Is this a legitimate charity?” is a question assistants are asked, and they answer from what they can find.
Post events and needs as they come up
Food drives, volunteer days, donation wish lists. Publish each one as a page or an event with a date, so the assistant reads what is happening now rather than last year’s drive.
Which schema should a nonprofit use?
NGO, the schema.org type for a non-governmental organization, with nonprofitStatus stating your legal status, such as Nonprofit501c3. If people visit you, list a LocalBusiness type as well, such as AnimalShelter or LocalBusiness itself, so your address and opening hours are marked up too.
Mark each dated event up as an Event; Google supports event results in search. Speak Local’s scanner reads NGO and every LocalBusiness type as entity schema.
nonprofitStatus, such asNonprofit501c3openingHoursSpecificationfor every service with its own hourssameAsfor your Candid and Charity Navigator profilesEventfor drives, volunteer days and fundraisers
Check it with Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator before it goes live.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": ["NGO", "LocalBusiness"],
"@id": "https://www.example.org/#org",
"name": "Example Community Pantry",
"url": "https://www.example.org/",
"telephone": "+1-555-0100",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "100 Example Street",
"addressLocality": "Your City",
"addressRegion": "ST",
"postalCode": "00000",
"addressCountry": "US"
},
"nonprofitStatus": "Nonprofit501c3",
"openingHoursSpecification": [
{
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"dayOfWeek": ["Tuesday", "Thursday"],
"opens": "16:00",
"closes": "19:00"
},
{
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"dayOfWeek": "Saturday",
"opens": "09:00",
"closes": "12:00"
}
],
"sameAs": [
"https://www.example-charity-profile.org/example-community-pantry"
]
}Where should a nonprofit start?
Work through these in order. None of them costs anything but time.
-
Give each service one clear page
Who it’s for, when, where, and what to bring, in words rather than a flyer.
-
Claim and update your Business Profile
Current hours, holiday closures, the services you offer, and photos of the place someone is walking into.
-
Make your legitimacy easy to check
Your status, your evaluator profiles and your annual report, linked from the site and consistent with each other.
-
Publish events and needs as dated pages
And take them down, or mark them past, when they’re over.
-
Track the questions people ask
“Food pantry open Saturday”, “donate furniture” and “volunteer this weekend” in your area, on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.
How does Speak Local help a nonprofit?
Every plan includes all of it. See the full platform for how the pillars combine into one score.
What it looks like for a nonprofit
Six screens from the workspace of an example food bank, as they look in the app. Choose one to see it.
An example workspace for a fictional food bank. The site audit and the competitors’ scores are real scans of test sites; the rankings, answers and traffic are sample data. Swipe the screen to see all of it.
Common questions
Is this different from Google Ad Grants?
Should we use NGO or a LocalBusiness type in our schema?
We run programs at several sites. How should we list them?
Do reviews matter for a nonprofit?
Our hours change every month. How do we keep up?
See where a nonprofit like yours stands.
Audit, score, fix and monitor how you show up in Google and in AI answers.
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