People are not Googling their questions about God anymore. They are asking a chatbot. If your ministry has spent years writing careful, biblical answers to the questions people actually ask, there is now a real chance that those answers are invisible in the place where the asking happens. This is what we learned rebuilding a fifteen-year-old ministry website so AI assistants could find and cite it — what worked, what didn’t, what it cost, and the numbers we can actually verify.
Why This Suddenly Matters
For twenty years, the deal was simple: someone typed a question into Google, Google showed ten links, and one of them might be yours. They clicked, they landed on your site, they read what you wrote.
That deal is quietly ending. When someone asks ChatGPT or Copilot or Perplexity “how do I know if I’m saved,” they usually get a composed answer instead of a list of links. Sometimes that answer cites sources. Often it doesn’t. Either way, the person gets their theology from the assistant, and the ministry that wrote the underlying material may never know it was involved.
Here’s the part that should get every ministry leader’s attention: somebody’s content is shaping that answer. Right now, for most spiritual questions, it isn’t yours — not because your teaching is worse, but because your pages weren’t built to be read by a machine that’s trying to answer a question in three sentences.
First, Check Whether the Robots Can Even Get In
This is the least glamorous item on the list and it was, for us, by far the most important.
Our site had a security plugin running a firewall module that challenged visitors it judged suspicious. It worked as designed. The trouble is that AI crawlers arrive from data-center IP addresses and don’t run JavaScript — which is precisely the profile that kind of firewall is built to stop.
We pulled the plugin’s own logs and found that Anthropic’s live fetcher — the one that runs when a real person asks Claude a question and it goes to read a page in that moment — had been blocked. Not many times. But every one of those was a real human being, asking a real question, whose answer was about to include our material, and didn’t.
We had no idea. There is no alert for this. The site looked perfect in a browser.
What to do: ask whoever manages your site to confirm that GPTBot, ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended all receive a normal 200 response on your pages. Check your robots.txt for rules blocking them. If you run a security plugin with an IP firewall, check its logs for AI user-agents. This is a thirty-minute task and it is the difference between everything else on this list working and none of it working.
Rewrite Your Openings So They Can Be Quoted
Most ministry articles — ours included — open with a story. A scene, a hook, a personal anecdote, and then eight paragraphs later, the actual answer.
That structure is good writing and bad machine-reading. An assistant pulling an answer needs a short, complete, self-contained response near the top of the page. If your first paragraph is a story about your grandmother, there is nothing there to quote.
We went through our teaching articles and added an answer-first paragraph at the top of each one: two to four sentences that directly answer the question in the title, with the relevant Scripture reference, before any story begins. The story stays. It just moves down.
On our post about assurance of salvation, the opening now says plainly that you can know you’re saved because salvation rests on God’s promises rather than your feelings, and cites 1 John 5:13 and Ephesians 2:8–9. When Bing serves a result for that question, that paragraph is what it shows — word for word.
We did this to 79 articles. It is genuinely the highest-value writing change we made.
Answer the Question People Actually Typed
Our headlines used to be sermon titles. Evocative, but not searchable. Nobody types “The Upside-Down Kingdom” into anything.
Two changes helped. First, we added H2 subheadings phrased as the actual questions people ask — not “Considerations,” but “Is anxiety a sin?” Second, we added FAQ sections to teaching articles, with the questions people genuinely send us, answered in a couple of sentences each.
You already know these questions. They’re in your inbox, your comment section, and every conversation you’ve had over coffee with someone new to faith. Write them down and answer them plainly.
Structured Data: Boring, Free, and It Works
Schema markup is a block of code that tells machines what a page contains — that this is an article, that this is the author, that this page is a list of Bible verses about anxiety with these twelve references. Most modern SEO plugins let you add it without touching code.
We did three things:
- Organization schema on the homepage with our full nonprofit identity — legal name, EIN, founding date, mission, address.
- FAQ schema on teaching articles containing FAQ sections.
- ItemList schema on all 88 of our Scripture-by-topic pages, enumerating every verse on the page.
One caution learned the hard way: we had three different plugins each generating schema, which produced duplicate and conflicting entries. We turned off all but one. If you take one thing from this section — make sure a single source is generating your structured data.
Your Ministry Identity Is Its Own Project
This turned out to be the most surprising finding of the whole exercise.
We tested by asking ChatGPT four questions cold, in temporary chats with no memory. For “how can I know I am saved” and “Bible verses about anxiety,” it never searched the web at all — it answered from what it already knew, citing nobody. For a forced search on the salvation question, it cited BibleGateway six times and no ministry at all.
But when we asked “What is Before The Cross ministry?” it searched, found us, and cited four separate pages — describing our mission accurately, naming our founding, our nonprofit status, our subscriber count, our reading plans, and even explaining what our name means. Then it offered to look into our leadership, theology, finances, and reputation.
Two lessons in that. First: assistants answer general Bible questions from memory but look up organizations. Second: when someone asks about your ministry — a donor, a foundation, a journalist, a parent deciding whether to trust you — an AI is going to assemble an answer from whatever it can find. You want that to be your About page, your doctrinal statement, and your public accountability record, described accurately.
Make sure your site clearly states who you are, what you believe, who leads you, and how you’re accountable. Register with the nonprofit transparency databases. Keep your public filings current. That work isn’t just for funders anymore.
What We Can Actually Measure
Here is where I want to be careful, because this field is full of confident claims that nobody can verify.
What is verifiable: Bing Webmaster Tools added an “AI Performance” report showing how often a site’s content was cited by Microsoft’s assistants. Ours shows roughly 1,800 citations over three months, across an average of six pages per day, with the daily rate roughly doubling to tripling from the start of that window to the end. That climb tracks with when the rewrites went live. The most-cited pages are the ones we optimized. That’s real data from the platform itself, and it’s free to look at.
What surprised us: almost none of that turns into traffic. Meanwhile our content was used in AI answers 1,800 times.
Sit with that, because it reframes everything. AI visibility is mostly not a traffic strategy. It’s a ministry-reach strategy. Hundreds of people received biblically grounded answers that came in part from our work and never landed on our site, never joined our list, never showed up in any metric we’d normally celebrate. If your goal is clicks, this will disappoint you. If your goal is that people receive sound teaching, it may be one of the widest doors available right now.
The few who do click are remarkable, for what it’s worth — near-total engagement, and one visitor from an AI assistant stayed on our site for more than seven minutes.
What We Couldn’t Fix
An honest list of the limits:
ChatGPT mostly doesn’t search for Bible questions. For common doctrinal and Scripture-list queries, it answers from training data. No amount of on-page work changes that answer. Influence there comes from being widely referenced across the internet over years — which is a slower, harder problem than markup.
Citations don’t equal traffic, and probably never will. See above.
The tooling is immature. Bing publishes citation data; as of this writing, the others largely don’t. You are measuring one corner of a room.
Authority still governs everything. Our weakest metric by far is how many other websites link to us. That’s what shapes whether an assistant considers you a source worth knowing, and you cannot fix it from inside your own site.
If You’re a Ministry Leader Reading This
You don’t need a budget or a developer for most of it. In rough order of value:
- Confirm AI crawlers aren’t blocked. Thirty minutes. Nothing else matters if this is wrong.
- Add an answer-first paragraph to your top twenty articles. Answer the title’s question in the first three sentences.
- Add real questions as subheadings, and an FAQ section to your major teachings.
- Turn on structured data through one plugin, and only one.
- Fix your identity pages — About, beliefs, leadership, accountability — and make sure your nonprofit records are public and current.
- Check Bing Webmaster Tools. It’s free, and the AI Performance report will tell you whether any of this is landing.
Then be patient. Ours took about six weeks of concentrated work and the citation numbers moved over the following month.
One Last Thing
I’ve spent this whole article on tactics, so let me say the part that actually motivates it.
I don’t care whether Before The Cross ranks well. I care that a nineteen-year-old at two in the morning, typing “am I actually saved” into whatever box is in front of him, gets an answer that is true.
Mike Mobley is the founder of Before The Cross, a 501(c)(3) digital ministry in its fifteenth year, and serves on staff at 121 Community Church in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. He writes about faith, ministry, and following Jesus at beforethecross.com. His own twenty-year story is here.
