Four retrieval controls and one public record to check on your nonprofit

Step 1: Start from the technical baseline Google publishes

Confirm the pages describing your organization are indexed and eligible to show a snippet before you change anything else.

By the last station you will have read four retrieval controls, checked what the public record says about your organization, and opened the two reports Google and Bing publish for their AI features. Start with the requirement itself. Google says there are no additional technical requirements for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond a page being indexed and eligible to show a snippet.

That baseline also settles what you can skip. Google says you do not need llms.txt, special AI text files, special AI markup or special schema.org markup to appear in Google Search's generative AI features, and that Google Search does not use those files for this purpose.

A separate article covers what the engines publish about getting pages cited.

Step 2: Read the Search generative AI control on your property

Open the Search generative AI control in Search Console, read the selected choice, and write it down.

Google Search Console carries a setting called the Search generative AI control, with three documented choices: include my site's links and content in Search generative AI features, exclude my site's links and content from Search generative AI features, and inherit control from parent. Read which one is selected and write it down with today's date.

Inherited settings. If the selected choice reads Inherit control from parent, this screen will not tell you which of the other two applies. The setting that governs your site sits on the parent property. Follow it there and record what it says before you call this station finished.

Write the property name next to the choice you read. The control is read per property, so a note that says only "excluded" will not tell the next person which property it described.

Step 3: Check the three crawler tokens in your robots.txt

Open your robots.txt and note which of the three tokens appears and what each one is set to.

Google documents Google-Extended as a standalone robots.txt product token. It controls whether content Google crawls may be used for training future Gemini models and for grounding in Gemini Apps and Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI.

OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot as the crawler that surfaces websites in ChatGPT search features, and says a site opted out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though it can still appear as a navigational link.

Anthropic's crawler documentation of 7 April 2026 separates three bots: ClaudeBot for content that may contribute to model training, Claude-User for user-directed retrieval, and Claude-SearchBot for improving search result quality and indexing content for search optimization. Anthropic says disabling Claude-SearchBot may reduce a site's visibility and accuracy in user search results.

Note which of the three tokens the file leaves out as well as what the present ones are set to. An absent token and a blocked token are different states, so write the note today in a way that still tells them apart a year from now.

Step 4: Verify what the public record says about your organization

Compare the legal name and exempt status in the public record against the name used on your own site.

The four controls cover permission. This station covers the record. For a US organization, the public copy is the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search, where the IRS says you can check:

• eligibility to receive tax-deductible charitable contributions
• Form 990 series returns and Form 990-N
• Pub. 78 data
• automatic revocation
• determination letters

Look your organization up, then compare the legal name and exempt status there with the name used across your site. The IRS last reviewed or updated that page on 28 June 2026.

For auditing the answers themselves, see a separate article.

Step 5: Correct how your own pages describe the grant

Search your own site for any sentence describing the grant as money received and rewrite it as in-kind search advertising.

Google's Ad Grants FAQ says qualifying nonprofits receive up to $10,000 per month in in-kind search advertising, not cash. Search your pages for wording that describes the grant as money your organization receives, and rewrite it as in-kind search advertising. A page saying Google gives your organization $10,000 a month in funding disagrees with Google's own FAQ about the program Google runs.

Keep the "up to" as well. It is how the FAQ describes the program, and it stops a reader taking $10,000 as money that arrives every month.

Step 6: Open the two reports and learn what an appearance looks like

Record this month's generative AI impressions and your top grounding queries.

Google's generative AI performance report defines an impression as how often links to your site are shown to users in generative AI features in Google Search. Record this month's number and read it as a count of links shown, not of answers that discussed your organization.

Bing's AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, announced in public preview on 10 February 2026, uses a different unit. Bing defines grounding queries as the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content that was referenced in AI-generated answers. Write your top grounding queries next to the Google figure.

A separate article covers what Search Console's Web: multimodal rows can and cannot tell you.

Cited without being named. The Ghost Citations Study, published by Semrush and Growth Memo on 9 June 2026, reported that 61.7% of the domain appearances it analysed were ghost citations: the domain was cited, but the brand name was not mentioned in the answer. In that sample, an appearance count and a count of times your organization was named are not the same measurement.

Step 7: Re-run these checks the next time the website changes

Repeat the control and record checks after any site migration, redesign or legal name change, and read the answers themselves rather than your position.

Tie the next pass to an event rather than a date. A migration, a redesign and a change of legal name each touch something you read on one of these stations, and all three can happen without anyone opening Search Console. The second pass is short, because you are only looking for the value that moved:

1. The Search generative AI control Read which of the three documented choices is selected, and follow it to the parent property if it still inherits.
2. The three robots.txt tokens Check Google-Extended, OAI-SearchBot and Anthropic's ClaudeBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot against what your note says they were set to.
3. The public record For a US organization, compare the legal name and exempt status in Tax Exempt Organization Search against the name now used on the site.
4. The two reports Record generative AI impressions in Search Console and your top grounding queries in Bing Webmaster Tools.

Leave your position in the results off that list. A measurement study of AI Overviews by Xu, Iqbal and Montgomery, posted on 13 May 2026, reported that AI Overviews activated for 13.7% of all queries and 64.7% of question-form queries. In the same study, nearly 30% of cited domains did not appear in the co-displayed first-page results, and 11.0% of decomposed atomic claims were unsupported by the cited pages.

In that sample, being cited in the answer and ranking on page one were not the same thing, and some of what the answers asserted was not carried by the pages they cited.

What to read again after the next website change

Seven stations, four of them controls you can read in one sitting. Keep the dated note of what each control and record said, and compare it against the same screens after the next migration, redesign or legal name change.

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