Two browser tabs, side by side, a little after six. On the left, Donorbox's page about agentic giving. The headline says "AI-powered giving is here." On the right, the click log for every donate button on GiveReady's charity profiles, last seven days: 2,076 clicks.
I sorted them. 1,646 were known crawlers. 418 were scripts walking through charity after charity, opening donate links for five or more different charities in a month. 12 looked like a person. I can't prove those 12 were donors.
That is the number I held up against the page on the left.
What Donorbox is actually saying
Donorbox has partnered with Stripe so its campaigns sit in Stripe Directory, a registry of businesses that AI agents can pay. A donor asks an assistant to find a cause, the assistant finds a campaign, and the gift either completes in the chat through Stripe Link or the donor lands on a pre-filled checkout page. Early access is for organisations with a US Stripe account. Fundraise Up sells a version of the same idea, plus an assessment that tests what assistants say about your charity.
Here is what I could not find on either company's pages: how many gifts an AI agent has completed, what it costs, or how a charity is verified before it is listed. The statistics are there, 10x growth in AI traffic and so on, with no sources. The Donorbox explore page says AI visitors stay four times longer. Their own blog says more than 70% longer. Same company, two numbers.
I am not mocking it. I built the same thing in the spring, an on-chain USDC endpoint so an agent could give to a charity directly. It has settled nine gifts. All nine were mine, testing it, and the last was in April. By volume of my own donations I am the market leader in agent giving, which tells you how big the market is.
The half that is real
Split agentic giving in two. Payment is unproven. Discovery is not: whether the assistant knows your charity exists and describes it correctly. Four applicants to the Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund have told us they found it by asking an AI assistant, and I wrote last month about why that pointed GiveReady at charities. A small charity can do something about discovery this week, for free.
So I asked Claude to read Donorbox's page and tell me how it is built. Pitch, how it works, what you get, who qualifies, questions, button. Good bones. I kept the order. I dropped the statistics, the "zero effort" promise, and anything suggesting a gift can be completed through us, because it can't. The GiveReady version says what we do (a free profile AI reads, sent to your own donation page), what we don't do (take a fee, finish a gift in the chat), and then offers the free check: 19 questions put to ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity about your charity, a one-page report in two working days.
There is also a plain-English article on agentic giving for charities with five things to do before paying anyone. Number four is to ask your platform, in writing, how many agent gifts it has completed.
What I would do in a small charity's chair
Ask four assistants who you are, in a private window. Make your name, registration number and one-line description identical everywhere you appear. Test your donation page from a link with the amount already in it. Then wait for someone to show a count.
Two days ago I would have written "the market is early." The click log is more specific than that: twelve.
Monthly Revenues $11,000 | Clients 2 | Prospects, not too worried about
Day 193 of 365.