How a Donation-Funded Nonprofit Is Winning AI Recommendations Over the Country's Biggest Rescues

When a pet owner asks an assistant where to get a dog spayed or which clinic to trust, the answer comes back as a short list of recommended names. The brands that surface tend to be the ones with the deepest content libraries and the cleanest structured data, which in most local categories means the national chains and the best-resourced nonprofits. Independent clinics and small rescues look at that and assume the game is decided by budget. The more useful read is that the signals AI systems reward are cheap to build and mostly ignored, which leaves a real opening for the operator willing to do the unglamorous work first. Recent measurement backs the fear up: AI citations in the veterinary space are concentrated among big chains, with a few corporate-owned groups taking an outsized share.

Samantha Quinones is the Founder and Chief Visibility Architect of Paw & Prosper, a consultancy that handles SEO and AI visibility for veterinary clinics, animal shelters, rescues, and pet wellness brands. She spent years running global enterprise SEO for companies like Arrow Electronics and IHS Markit before bringing that discipline to independent animal organizations, most of which are meeting AI search with more skepticism than strategy. Her position is that the visibility gap between big and small is closable, and she has a client's dashboard to prove it.

The proof matters to her because the alternative is telling small operators to sit the era out. "This gives all of our smaller independent practices hope that with the right levers and the right strategy, we can out-cite the bigger players in the game," says Quinones. Before any of that pays off, though, she has to correct a misconception she meets on almost every sales call.

Two search lanes

Many clinic owners treat search as a single box already checked. Quinones finds them conflating traditional Google optimization with AI visibility, assuming that ranking on Google means they are covered everywhere buyers now look. "A lot of clinics are bundling traditional search and AI search as one. They're like, 'Oh yeah, our Google search is taken care of,'" says Quinones. Her correction is that the two are complementary but not interchangeable, and optimizing for one does not deliver the other, which is why she treats AI visibility as a distinct layer rather than a setting inside the old work.

The demand side is what makes the correction urgent. Quinones points to figures she has been tracking that show a roughly 1,200% jump in ChatGPT-driven traffic to veterinary sites over the past year, alongside research finding that 38% of pet owners now use AI somewhere in their vet research, a share that rises to 51% among owners under 35. "Ready or not, it's here," she says of the shift. Optimizing only for blue links now means competing for a shrinking slice of how buyers actually find a clinic.

What a donation budget bought

Her evidence is a nonprofit client in Texas, Lone Star Animal Welfare League, which subsidizes spay and neuter services for low-income families and runs entirely on donations. There was no marketing war chest to spend. Quinones started with the least glamorous layer, fixing site navigation and structural issues, then built the blog the organization had never had. "We focused on fixing their technical foundation, and now their main driver is just relevant blog content," says Quinones, meaning posts on topics LSAWL's audience actually searches, structured with chunked sections and FAQs so a model can parse them.

The numbers moved fast. Google Search impressions climbed from about 1,500 a month in March to 51,000 in August, and AI-specific impressions went from roughly 29 a day in May to more than 900 by early September, close to a 30x lift. What Quinones underscores is who LSAWL passed on the way up. For the topic she tracks most closely, low-cost spay and neuter, the donation-funded nonprofit now out-cites the ASPCA, Best Friends Animal Society, and the national Humane Society arm. "The tactics we're using are pretty simple, but we're moving the needle pretty significantly," says Quinones, and the result puts a small operator in the same company as other independents learning to beat much bigger competitors in AI results.

Recommended versus cited

Appearing in an AI answer and being the source behind it are different outcomes, and Quinones is candid that she has not cracked how to force the second. One client's business was recommended in the response, but the citation underneath pointed to a local directory rather than the client's own site. She banks that as a partial win. "That is not a complete loss, because your business is still being recommended as the go-to choice," says Quinones. The recommendation is the outcome the client pays for, even when the link credit lands elsewhere.

What she can control is entity clarity. Her working model is a pyramid: get your own website and Google Business Profile saying the same thing about hours, services, and pricing, then make sure directories and third-party listings reinforce it. "LLMs are looking for you as an entity online, not just your business," says Quinones. Keeping those signals consistent gives the models fewer reasons to reach past a clinic when they decide who to name, which is the foundation of showing up in AI results at all.

Measuring what counts

The measurement problem is that citations do not reliably turn into clicks. Quinones points to research showing a large and growing share of Google searches end without any click, which means an assistant can recommend a clinic without ever sending a visit its way. Her workaround is to watch referral sources for LLM traffic and to track branded and direct visits, on the logic that someone who hears a name in a chat and then types it into a browser is the sign the recommendation landed. "Answers are literally replacing visits," says Quinones.

She is equally wary of the content treadmill that AI has revived. Rather than pushing out posts to chase citations, she starts by auditing legacy content, asking an assistant directly what it already knows about a business and looking for gaps or errors to patch at the source. "I would defer away from just trying to pump out content for the sake of trying to get cited," says Quinones, and her rule for the pet wellness vertical is the one that survived the move from Google to AI: keep the information consistent everywhere the brand appears, and keep it useful.