Happy New Year! This feels like the right moment to pause and take stock of what 2025 brought to the digital landscape, when we are freshly out of the busiest season of the year.
Below are ten significant forces that defined 2025. Some have been building for years, others are just getting started, but all of them will shape what comes next.
Streetlight Digital spent 2025 testing and adapting across these areas with our clients. We’re turning those lessons into frameworks, tools, and clearer strategies, and we’ll share more in 2026.
1) AI Everywhere
AI exploded in 2025 and quite potentially rose above the peak of inflated expectations. It is everywhere. It made its way into all the ad platforms. AI Max. Copy generation. Image and video creation within the platforms. Google has an Ads Advisor that shows potential. Microsoft went all in with Copilot. Google integrated Gemini into Workspace. Tools like SparkToro created functionality that taps into LLMs to create content from audience research. SEMrush and Conductor have connectors with GPT.
We reached a tipping point: it is official, there is now more AI-generated content than human-generated content on the web. However, this might come as a shock, but some people (and search engines) do not appreciate AI-generated content. That places a premium on human content and the places where humans congregate.
The platforms that care about their communities responded. Pinterest introduced user controls to determine how much AI you see. Reddit began testing verified profiles, so you know a user is actually human. Reddit got slammed with low-quality AI content because people realized Google’s AI Overviews were surfacing Reddit threads, so they started spamming Reddit to game that visibility. Wild huh?
2) The Wild West
We are in a wild west phase with AI. There is no blueprint. No manual for how to build AI-fluent teams or how to adopt these tools. No playbook for what should be automated and what should not. Everyone is improvising, learning, and experimenting. Any sales person who tells you they have all the answers: be wary.
We saw proof of this on Giving Tuesday. We analyzed ads on Meta active on December 3, 2025 that contained the word “Giving Tuesday.” We found 1,688 ad archive URLs. 22% of them contained em dashes. That is a signal of unedited LLM output making it onto center stage. It shows how early we still are in figuring this out.
It is promising to see Anthropic investing in Claude for Nonprofits, released in early December 2025. It provides resources and integrations with platforms like Blackbaud. If Anthropic invested in that, OpenAI will probably have something similar soon. They are in a foot race and they are all heading toward the same destination: monetization. We are already seeing conversational ads in Perplexity and OpenAI. The future of visibility within those tools will likely be some combination of organic and paid.
3) The Organic Cliff
One of the most popular questions from clients in 2025: “Why don’t I show up in ChatGPT for this query?” In a way, it is a useful shift. We are finally paying attention to visibility outside of traditional Google rankings.
What caught everyone’s eye was that organic traffic for a lot of nonprofits went down severely. Especially categories like health that rely on informational queries. Those queries were decimated by Google AI Overviews. Zero-click behavior accelerated. Publishers, including nonprofits, are getting fewer people to their websites via organic search.
People are starting to ask better questions. “Traffic is down, but what about gifts and revenue?” Or: “How can I recoup that traffic, and will it come through organic or some other way?” LLMs contributed to the continued fragmentation of search and content discovery. Google is still the biggest player, but the behavior is spreading across more places. People discover content on Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube, and those surfaces increasingly influence perceived authority.
Google’s AI experiences are also evolving quickly, and Search Labs experiments are often the earliest signals of where things are headed. One pattern is clear: Google increasingly favors experiences that keep users inside its ecosystem. We saw this over time as YouTube became more prominent in traditional search, and we are seeing a similar dynamic now with local and entity-style results showing up more inside AI-influenced experiences. A smart move for 2026 is improving local visibility: optimize Google Business Profiles across locations and align them tightly with location pages, including categories, descriptions, hours, photos, posts, Q&A, and review management.
4) The GoFundMe Fiasco
In the fall, GoFundMe got exposed. They had created donation pages for nonprofits without their knowledge, collecting donations, taking a fee, and giving nonprofits no way to follow up with donors. Not great.
But the real lesson wasn’t about GoFundMe. These pages had been ranking in organic search for a long time before anyone noticed. It pointed out how easy it is to overlook SEO. If more of us were monitoring branded search results, this would have surfaced much earlier.
SEO is not a faucet you can turn on like paid media. It is insanely complex and requires a literal Swiss Army knife of skills and discipline. And it usually ends up living in the wrong place within nonprofit orgs. The biggest takeaway from the GoFundMe situation: SEO deserves more attention than most of us give it.
5) Privacy Matters More
The year started with Meta rolling out data restrictions for sensitive categories like health. First phase in February, second phase in the summer. For impacted advertisers, this required us to fundamentally reconsider how we measure events, build audiences, and capture important outcomes.
It forced conversations about faster adoption of server-side tracking and moving away from the old ways. Google acknowledged the crisis in May 2025 with the release of Google Tag Gateway (formerly First-Party Mode). This gave advertisers a lifeline: a way to route tags through our own first-party domains via a CDN like Cloudflare, without the massive IT overhead of a full server-side container. It was not a silver bullet for the Meta policy restrictions, but it helped stop the bleeding from browser-based data loss.
6) The PMax Black Box and Brand CPC Inflation
Automation is where the major ad platforms are headed, and Google Performance Max is the clearest example. It asks advertisers to trade control for scale, and most settings act as signals, not levers.
The problem is that transparency lagged adoption. In 2024, scripts existed to surface channel insights and search terms, but most advertisers were not using them. In 2025, many organizations may have overbudgeted for PMax because the in-platform reporting arrived late and the campaign often looked like it was “working” without showing what it was actually doing.
Once you look inside, two patterns show up fast. First, brand cannibalization: we have seen cases where 95%+ of PMax spend and conversions come from brand. Second, quiet conquesting: PMax can expand into competitor terms even when that was never the intent. Layer that onto Google’s push toward broad match, smart bidding, and query expansion, plus weaker organic visibility that forces more nonprofits to compete harder for high-intent traffic, and brand CPC inflation starts to make sense.
Meta is moving in the same direction with Advantage+. The work shifts away from hunting for one perfect audience and toward building distinct creative angles for different personas, then feeding the system clean signals so it can match message to people across placements.
7) YouTube is TV and Creators are the Format
It is the biggest screen in the house, and it is where attention keeps consolidating. We can buy it in more ways than ever. Demand Gen lets us lean into YouTube intentionally, and reserved inventory is more accessible without needing a Google rep. That democratized inventory that used to feel gated.
What stood out this giving season is what actually cut through on those screens. Creator and influencer nonprofit videos were everywhere. It was a clear counterweight to AI slop and templated ads.
The best performing video often looked more like a person than an ad. Partnership ads let you take a creator post that works and scale it through paid distribution. That is the unlock. Not “everyone needs influencers,” but that attention and trust increasingly travel through people, and the platforms are making it easier to pay to distribute that kind of content.
8) The Creator Surge
Creator-led nonprofit video exploded this giving season. In feeds that feel more automated and crowded, a real person speaking to camera is the clearest pattern interrupt.
Meta and Google’s partnership ad updates made the shift bigger: nonprofits can run paid ads from the creator’s handle, not just their own page. That changes how the message is received because it carries a human trust signal, not a brand label.
This is peer-to-peer fundraising logic at scale, with one critical upgrade over organic influencer posts: it stays fully trackable, so “word of mouth” can be evaluated like media.
9) The Flight to Safety (and the Inbox War)
In 2025, as Meta and Google pushed harder toward automation, the list became the most controllable lever left. But two things changed fast: inbox AI summaries (notably in Apple Mail and Gmail) started mediating what donors actually see, making open rates less useful and putting new pressure on subject lines and the first line of copy. At the same time, nonprofit SMS volume surged, and fatigue showed up quickly in opt-outs and weaker response to blast-style texting. The list still matters, but 2025 raised the cost of abusing it and lowered the margin for sloppy deliverability and trust.
10) What We Learned in the Giving Season
Paid media showed up when it mattered most, and paid search in particular performed strongly. Microsoft also surprised us with performance and earned a bigger seat at the table going into 2026. Timing mattered more than ever, not just Giving Tuesday and December 31, but the days leading into them when intent was building. We also saw meaningful conversion activity into the evening hours, which makes budget pacing and end-of-day visibility a real performance lever.
This giving season was one for the books and from our side of things with seemingly endless insights to share. Streetlight Digital is preparing a comprehensive report highlighting the peaks and valleys of Giving Tuesday and Year-End Donations soon. This will provide incredible insights for our nonprofit friends for your 2026 fundraising strategy. Stay tuned!
