AI is telling your institution’s story. Is it the right one?
Student trust in AI-generated answers is rising quickly. A recent study found that one in three prospective students now trust AI for program research. That trust is shaping real college decisions, with roughly one-third of students saying they discovered a school through AI, and nearly one in five removing a school from their list due to information surfaced by AI. Clearly, AI is a growing influence in the college decision-making process. Yet most have experienced its tendency to provide information that’s lacking in context or downright incorrect. So, what happens if AI is getting your institution wrong?
As a senior content strategist on the Web & Digital Solutions team at EAB, I work directly with partners who want to understand how their institutions appear across AI platforms and whether they are being accurately represented. In this blog, I’ll explore how AI is shaping brand perception and share four high-impact content strategies you can implement to help make sure you’re showing up correctly across platforms.
AI answers are where brand perception now begins
Recently, one of our partners came to us concerned that AI was misrepresenting their institution. In their experience, AI-generated descriptions of their institution were disproportionately focused on past campus protests. While the events were real, this institution felt the narrative didn’t accurately reflect the truth of their campus community. This partner isn’t alone. Their experience points to a much larger change in how students discover and evaluate colleges.
While your .edu homepage used to be one of the first places prospective students encountered your institution, the entry point to discovery has shifted. Now, 68% of Google searches end without a click as users find what they’re looking for within AI-generated answers and summaries.
The challenge in this zero-click environment is that generative AI answers user questions with the most authoritative information it can find—which is not always what’s on your official channels. If your institution hasn’t clearly and consistently told its own story across the web, AI will assemble one from third-party sources instead. Sometimes those sources offer an incomplete picture. Other times, they reinforce outdated perceptions. Either way, prospective students are forming impressions of your institution before they ever visit your website.
To complicate things further, 80% of Gen Z and Millennial students research schools independently until late in the enrollment journey, in a search behavior known as stealth shopping. Students are often shaping their impressions and making decisions about your institution on their own for most of their college search. Since institutions have fewer opportunities to correct misconceptions later in the process, getting the story right from the beginning is increasingly important.
The good news is that institutions have far more influence over brand perception than they may realize.
Brand is the strongest signal you can give AI
As AI transforms when and how institutions are perceived, brand becomes your competitive advantage. A strong brand builds awareness and affinity early in the college search, when you have the greatest opportunity to shape students’ perceptions and earn a place on their shortlist. AI can readily summarize information like deadlines, tuition, and program requirements. However, it relies on the storytelling elements of brand that authentically reflect the student experience (think success stories, testimonials, and alumni outcomes), to understand what sets one institution apart from another.
By consistently communicating your institutional strengths across channels, you create a solid foundation for AI to draw from, and one that’s compelling enough to encourage prospective students to learn more.
This brand awareness ensures that even when students are stealth shopping and not clicking through to your website, they’re still getting an accurate picture of your institution when it matters most.
For the partner who came to us dissatisfied with the way AI was representing their institution, the solution to improving their brand perception wasn’t to avoid difficult questions about their campus community, but to provide AI with a more complete picture of their institution on the channels they own.
Through EAB’s Web & Digital Solutions, our team identified where AI platforms were sourcing information. From there, we determined the brand strengths, weaknesses, and narrative gaps that contributed to the story AI was telling about them and recommended ways to shift that story with more accurate, authoritative content.
While every institution’s challenges are different, the recommendations we made for this partner can help any institution. Here are four high-impact content strategies you can use to tell a more complete story:
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Answer the questions students are already asking
One of the biggest misconceptions about shaping brand perception is that institutions should avoid addressing their perceived weaknesses. In reality, the opposite is true. If prospective students are asking AI questions about topics like campus culture or high cost, your institution should be the first and most authoritative source of those answers.
For our partner, that meant creating structured content around community that authentically reflected the student experience. By proactively telling that story on their own channels, such as their website and social media, they gave AI more representative information to draw from rather than relying on third-party sources to define their campus culture for them.
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Connect claims to proof
AI can summarize what your institution says about itself, but it places greater confidence in claims that are supported by evidence. Highlighting student-led affinity groups, diversity initiatives, student support resources, and measurable outcomes that demonstrated the institution’s commitment in practice helped to strengthen their statements about campus culture.
The more evidence your institution provides, the stronger and more credible your digital narrative becomes for all users.
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Structure content for AI comprehension
Great stories aren’t enough if AI can’t easily parse information. Content that’s buried in PDFs, dispersed across pages, or written without clear header structure is less likely to be surfaced accurately in AI systems.
Instead, organize important information using descriptive, search-optimized headings, frequently asked questions sections that mirror the way students search, and focused page topics that serve as authoritative sources of information. Content that’s easy for prospective students to scan is often easier for AI to interpret as well.
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Let students tell your story
No one communicates your institution’s culture more credibly than your students. Student stories, testimonials, day-in-the-life content, and social takeovers provide the nuance and authenticity that institutional messaging alone cannot.
These firsthand perspectives help students envision themselves on your campus while giving AI richer context about what makes your institution distinct.
Take control of the narrative
Students’ trust in AI is defining how they evaluate colleges. As AI-generated answers shape first impressions, institutions can no longer assume that prospective students will first encounter them through the .edu website. Instead, they’ll often meet you through AI-generated answers assembled from the most complete information available. If your digital channels aren’t built out with authoritative answers to the questions users are asking, you risk being misrepresented.
The opportunity to shift the narrative lies in establishing a more complete story for AI to draw from. By building out your official channels with structured, authoritative content, you increase the likelihood that students’ first impression of your institution is an accurate reflection of who you are.
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