Why SEO Isn't Enough in the Age of AI

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0:00:11.4 Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. Today we examine how AI tools like ChatGPT are changing the way students and families learn about colleges and make final decisions about where to apply. Our experts also offer tips for university leaders to make sure the digital content they create is easily found and interpreted, not just by the humans they want to recruit, but also by the AI systems those humans rely on. So give these folks a listen and enjoy.

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0:00:47.8 Michael Koppenheffer: Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Michael Koppenheffer, and I am a longtime Office Hours visitor. I’ve recorded a bunch of these episodes, and in one way or another, they’ve all been focused on how colleges and universities are evolving their marketing strategies to fit today’s challenges and the challenges to come. And I would say that one of the biggest changes that I’ve seen in my career is the evolution that’s taken place over just the past few years in terms of how AI is impacting how students and their families discover and evaluate colleges. Because tools like Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, they are quickly becoming a very important intermediary in how families find and interpret information. And that means that they’re shaping how students and their families perceive institutions before they ever visited a campus or attended an information session or talked to a counselor. So joining me today to talk about this really important phenomenon is my colleague Val Fox. Welcome to Office Hours, Val.

0:02:05.4 Val Fox: Hey, thank you so much, Michael. I’m so happy to be here with you.

0:02:07.2 Michael Koppenheffer: So Val, you also are no stranger to this podcast, but will you take a minute to remind folks who you are and what you do at EAB?

0:02:16.7 Val Fox: Sure. I am a senior director in the Adult Learner Recruitment team. So I spend all day every day with my colleagues worried about how to recruit adult learners into online, graduate, and degree completion programs, working with institutions all over the country. I’m a former higher ed chief marketing officer as well, so I tend to be the person in the room asking higher ed leaders, “What does this look like from the prospective student’s perspective?” And increasingly, “How are they going to find you, right?” And so we’re steering the conversation into today’s topic, maybe, which is AI visibility. And this is coming up more and more as I push on that kind of visibility agenda with higher ed leaders. And I’m thrilled to be here talking about this topic with you today.

0:03:10.7 Michael Koppenheffer: Well, I can’t wait to dive in. So let’s start with the big picture. Tell us a bit about how AI is changing the way that prospective students and their families search for information about colleges and why institutions should care about whether they use AI-powered search or not.

0:03:28.7 Val Fox: Well, let’s take a step back and think about the last 20 years. There was essentially one main door to college campuses, and it was the digital front door, right? Students increasingly have been using Google as their way to find institutions, programs of interest. And students have been asking Google, which also now serves up answers through AI overviews, but increasingly are also using tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, to find information. And so that digital front door is changing. It’s no longer just a search engine results page. It’s now an AI-generated answer. And that’s a really big shift for institutions to think about. Siri, Alexa, and another dozen or so large language models, okay? And so marketers have always been racing to keep up, and college campuses have always been racing to keep up, right?

0:04:15.5 Val Fox: They were trying to really game the system and appear in search engine results through search engine optimization. And now there’s GEO and AEO and all of these other terms. And I’d say that what’s happening is the prospective grad student is increasingly reliant on those kinds of platforms and tools. And so institutions need to find a way to reach those students by doing all of the optimization.

0:04:51.1 Michael Koppenheffer: Yeah, that’s a great synopsis of how the world has been evolving. And you mentioned grad students. I think it’s really interesting here to think about how pervasive this phenomenon is, whether you’re a 16-year-old beginning to think about your college options or someone in their 20s or 30s or 40s thinking about their potential for doing a graduate program or a professional degree. You also mentioned one of my favorite letters, which is SEO and GEO. For many years, marketers, especially higher ed marketers in this case, have focused on search engine optimization as the… One of the main ways that they can influence how visitors come to their front door, right? Now we’re hearing about generative engine optimization, GEO, or answer engine optimization, AEO. What is the difference between this alphabet soup of acronyms? And help us understand that to start with.

0:06:06.0 Val Fox: Sure. So SEO, starting there, search engine optimization was really optimizing for having your school or brand visible in traditional Google search engine results, right? And so that was kind of the predominant form of searching for the past 20 years. And now we’ve got generative engine optimization, or GEO, of the alphabet soup. That’s really optimizing your site for visibility in the large language models like ChatGPT, Perplexity. And then there’s AEO, answer engine optimization, which is optimizing your site for quick answer engines like Siri or Alexa. And so what used to be just one main doorway to your site, which was Google, you’ve now got dozens of doorways through all of these new forms of searching. And so it’s really, schools have to up their game and make sure that they’re visible across all of those different platforms. And it’s challenging, right?

0:07:14.3 Val Fox: It requires just, it’s learning a new language for one, but it also requires really specialized skills that, if schools weren’t already investing in SEO, they’re probably, there’s a big gap that they’re gonna need to fill to shore up their capabilities across what is now a very and really fractured and challenging kind of landscape out there.

0:07:39.9 Michael Koppenheffer: So you’re describing a lot of new work for marketing teams, right? Like this sounds like this is taking a hard job and making it harder. What does it look like, maybe if you put your CMO hat back on, what does a best-in-class approach to GEO look like today?

0:08:00.4 Val Fox: Yeah, well, I love sharing examples from outside the industry. And I think most of us are familiar with Zillow. If you type in any address in the US today, you get a map, okay, but you also get a Zillow real estate listing, right? Especially if it’s a residential address, right? You’re gonna get that Zillow listing right at the top of your search engine results and increasingly AI overview panels. And that’s because Zillow spent years becoming the answer for almost every residential real estate question. They authored neighborhood guides, they created school pages, home values, mortgage calculators, the list goes on and on, and eventually they just built trust and credibility with Google. And so that kind of building that strong digital ecosystem and reputation has compounded over decades.

0:09:04.8 Val Fox: And universities, I think, need to start thinking about the investments they’ve made in academic reputation is certainly incredibly important, but now they need to start thinking about investing in their digital reputation because that’s increasingly what AI systems use to decide what sites to recommend. And so the schools that are doing the best work in this space and they’re further along are generally the ones that are already pretty mature in that digital strategy. Maybe they’re thinking kind of like the Zillow playbook, right? They’ve got these huge digital footprints that are producing the kind of assets that AI models really like to cite. It could be FAQs and faculty research, news and press articles, or citations that live across the web. So it’s not impossible. There’s great examples out there of schools doing this work, but when I say all that and kind of couch it in that Zillow model, you can see how it can seem very overwhelming.

0:10:09.8 Michael Koppenheffer: Yeah, and Zillow, of course, is a national brand with a marketing budget that probably dwarfs all but a few universities. And yet I see the wisdom of the approach that you’re suggesting, which is that you think about your digital reputation and all the investments you make to build that up to try to influence the AI results. Do you feel like the playbook is the same whether you’re worrying about a college’s overall reputation, thinking about graduate programs, undergraduate programs? Is it basically the same work, or are there distinctions depending upon the objective you’re trying to achieve?

0:10:51.2 Val Fox: Sure. I do think that schools, look, you bring up a great point, which is, okay, you’re sharing examples on national case studies here. What about schools that are maybe just trying to optimize for more discrete use cases? Like, I want to grow visibility for this set of programs or for these strategic initiatives, right? And so there are great examples out there. We actually recently partnered with a school, Regis University in Denver, that really wanted to increase its presence for its healthcare programs in the Denver area. And so they really isolated for a few key use cases. And when you think through that lens, you don’t need to reinvent your entire website or build the kind of ecosystem I described earlier with Zillow. You’re really just looking at those enrollment-critical pages related to the healthcare programs and optimizing and creating more AI-ready content on those key pages.

0:11:57.3 Val Fox: And doing that kind of work can very readily impact your visibility. In the case of Regis, their visibility grew over 900% in under six months. So it really should not seem as daunting. If you kind of isolate for and kind of apply a real surgical approach to doing this kind of work. So there is a real big range in terms of the use cases and the goals that schools can look at this as an exercise to either improve enrollment outcomes for key programs in a short time period or decide to really invest on a long-term basis in their digital reputation and visibility for their brand.

0:12:47.9 Michael Koppenheffer: That’s really encouraging because at first, as you were describing all the work that’s required in some of the out-of-industry success stories, it made me think that this is going to be a winners and losers situation where the schools, whether they’re big national universities or online giants, the ones with big budgets, that they are the ones who are going to actually thrive in this future scenario. But what I’m hearing you say is that if you are clear about your goals and you make targeted improvements in certain kinds of content, certain kinds of pages, certain aspects of your online presence, you can actually be successful.

0:13:27.5 Val Fox: Absolutely. And I think for most schools, if they’re starting, if they haven’t already invested in SEO and they’re looking to play catch-up, the most… What I’d recommend as far as the out-of-the-gate playbooks or use cases would be to isolate for some discrete goals like the one I just mentioned with Regis and then grow from there, right? Start thinking about your entire portfolio of programs and/or other strategic initiatives related to brands, but start small and carve out a few key wins so that you can report back on the investments and the return on those investments and make the case to continue to expand the work that you’re doing so that you can get the budget, the support, the staffing and or look for partners who can help you make that kind of case so that you can expand your footprint from there.

0:14:29.6 Michael Koppenheffer: That is encouraging to hear you say, like a bit of a land and expand strategy or prioritize on the most urgent and then move on from there. You and I both spend a lot of time talking to marketing leaders at universities. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you’re seeing in how higher ed leaders are meeting this challenge? Are you seeing some missteps of one kind or another?

0:15:01.4 Val Fox: Yeah. I would say I’m seeing a lot of schools treat this as a siloed experiment, right? Where they’re starting maybe with they’re giving somebody a budget. Maybe there’s somebody who’s been willing to raise their hand and say, sure, I’d like to try this and it’s a bit of a skunkworks project in the back office. They get a budget. Maybe they start using a tool. And that kind of approach is really not going to be very scalable. You’ve got one person maybe trying to game the system with their LLM of choice. But with the proliferation of LLMs and the fact that the results that that person is going to get is unique to their search history, it’s really not going to be indicative of how a prospective student is searching. And so…

0:15:52.2 Michael Koppenheffer: That’s such a great point because I’ve talked to a bunch of colleges who have not even begun to think about this. I’ve talked to a bunch of colleges who said, oh yeah, someone in my office is routinely typing into ChatGPT, is name of college “is a good school?” I was like, well, that’s better than nothing. But to your point, that doesn’t actually give you anything approaching an objective picture of what’s really happening. And that doesn’t really tell you where to prioritize or focus.

0:16:20.6 Val Fox: Right, right. I mean, I applaud, look, I applaud the solopreneur approach, [chuckle] but…

0:16:25.4 Michael Koppenheffer: Sure, sure.

0:16:28.1 Val Fox: It’s not going to get you the kind of results. So I would say that, and I’m not surprised that you’re seeing that as well, I would say schools really need to start thinking about educating leadership around the value of this, the importance of this, to get the kind of support and resources that you need, which in most cases is not going to reside within a central marketing operation. It’s just the skills are very specialized, and most teams I know today are, don’t have those skills on staff. And certainly, if they did, they probably don’t have the capacity to be doing the kind of work at the scale, right, that they need. So really look for partners that can help you with both the scalability and the specialized skills. And then you’ll have not only the ability to measure and monitor how you’re doing, but actually manage, right? So partners that can tell you these are the very surgical kind of adaptive improvements you need to make to each page, to these pages or set of pages on your site. And you’ll be able to see the impact in fairly short order if your goals are really clear to begin with.

0:17:42.6 Michael Koppenheffer: Yeah, and the last thing you said is so important, which is that, like so many things of strategic importance, you’re only going to be able to succeed if you know what you’re trying to succeed at. And I do observe sometimes that leaders at colleges and universities feel like they’ve inherited an AI mandate and they have to do something about AI, but it really is action for action’s sake. They haven’t necessarily progressed to the “so what?” part of the equation. Conversely, though, I have to tell you that over the last couple years, as I’ve been thinking about how AI is going to affect college search and I’ve been talking to college and university leaders about it, even without me leading them there, almost the first conclusion that comes to mind for nearly everyone I talk to is like, “Wow, we really are going to have to pay more attention to what the AIs are saying about us.” It’s not hard to convince someone of its importance. I think it’s the what you do next, to your point, that’s where it gets a little more challenging and confusing, especially because these are skills and expertise that doesn’t typically already reside on staff for many of the partners we work with.

0:19:06.2 Val Fox: So related to that, that’s a great point, like, what do we do next? How are schools getting off the block there successfully? What have you seen? And how, like, where does that typically originate? Is it in a central marketing and communication shop, or is it originating somewhere else in the organization?

0:19:28.1 Michael Koppenheffer: Well, earlier you referred to the idea that silos aren’t going to be your friend here, right? That there is such distributed ownership of both the strategic imperative but also the actions required to manage AI visibility. And I’ve seen that play out live where the enrollment teams, however they’re structured, typically are beginning to care about AI visibility, and yet the central marketing teams typically are the ones who have both the domain understanding and the authority and the access to make the necessary changes. And so this really requires a cross-campus collaboration to be effective at managing AI visibility. I’ll also say, and you and I both have been working a ton on this, that without a way to measure your AI visibility, you’re not going to get very far. And we’ve seen across even the last few months tools start to come out that attempt to measure what ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini are saying about you.

0:20:43.2 Michael Koppenheffer: A lot of the SEO tools have added AI visibility overlays to try to do this. As, again, as we know very well, we realized that higher ed is a little different, as it often is. And the existing tools that were on the market didn’t do a particularly good job measuring real student intent or family intent in terms of how they use the AI tools. And they don’t necessarily have the right action framework about the most leveraged things you can do to improve. And so we actually, at EAB, developed our own set of dashboards for managing GEO as well as SEO. And that has been really fascinating for us to see how those have begun to spark conversation on campus and begin to drive action as well.

0:21:41.3 Val Fox: Hearing you say that makes me think that we maybe could be brainstorming. Maybe we start right now, Michael, about enabling leadership teams to hold AI summits on campus. Because I do think this idea of creating institutional knowledge and awareness around this is only going to raise the visibility and galvanize teams to work together. And I think the central marketing teams certainly should have the mandate if they don’t already. And if they need to take that mantle, I would say leading with just, especially as they lean into the new academic year, bringing teams from across campus and certainly a central communications committee into some kind of AI visibility summit where they’re looking at best practices. We have a ton of resources for one on eab.com/geo. So a little call out for that, but access to resources that really help elevate the best practices here and answer the question why their colleagues across campus should care.

0:22:53.1 Michael Koppenheffer: That’s a great idea. That’s such a…

0:22:56.0 Val Fox: Let’s do it. We started a new… [chuckle]

0:22:58.6 Michael Koppenheffer: Yeah, I think we can start a new trend. And I love that idea because if you think about long-term, how you’re going to manage your digital reputation, which is going to be so important to your visibility and to your success, and honestly, not just for enrollment, it’s going to be important for advancement, important for other things. The way you do it requires pulling a lot of different levers. And so we’ve talked a lot about websites today, right, and content you create. And that is really important. But if you think beyond that, how else does ChatGPT find out about colleges or programs? Finds out because of earned media, so news stories. If you think about PR and external affairs, that plays in. You find out because of social media. The AIs are prolific consumers of social media. And so what students might be saying about you on Reddit or Instagram, that’s going to play in. And so how you manage your social accounts, like, that is important. And so you were really talking me into the case for a cross-functional working group because I really think that is part of the path to success.

0:24:15.6 Val Fox: Agreed, agreed. And I know that CMOs are thinking about this. We surveyed over 300 of them last year and nearly half plan to increase their spend on search visibility with a nod to AI in the coming year. And the majority of their budgets are tied to enrollment efforts. So creating a bright line between visibility and enrollment and then, should help galvanize all those constituents across campus and stakeholders. But I think what’s missing is just the shared understanding of what to do about it. You talked about explainers and news articles and things, but faculty citations, too, are a huge leverage point for the LLMs and the AIs’ search that. So getting faculty involved to create more content, giving everybody kind of a role to play in this and making it a unified effort, and then doing readouts across campus on the impact that this has had, I think would be a great moment for cross-collaboration.

0:25:27.3 Val Fox: And I’d love to see and hear stories back if there are marketers listening to this that want to take this kind of mantle and run with it. But, I’d love to hear back on if this helps galvanize teams to really launch an initiative squarely focused on AI visibility and bring all those people together under one tent. I’d love that.

0:25:52.6 Michael Koppenheffer: That’s such a great idea. And it makes me think just about how fast the domain of AI is moving. As we all know, things are changing daily, weekly, and how students and families, prospective students, will use AI, that is changing too. And I think this hypothetical working group that you’ve called together, I think one of the things that they need to reflect on is how are my audiences using AI as an information source and a decision support and so forth? How are they using it today? How are they likely to use it in three to six to nine months? Because knowing how long it takes to organize efforts on campus, you need to be looking a little bit out into the future and meet the market where it’s going to be, not just where it is or where it was a few months ago. And to that end, and I suppose this could be a coming attraction, we have been trying to do a lot of primary research to understand what students and families are doing.

0:27:00.9 Michael Koppenheffer: We’ve done surveys of CMOs, as Val mentioned, but we’ve also done surveys of thousands and thousands and thousands of prospective students. And when we’ve done that, we’ve seen the pace of AI adoption in college search accelerate. We’ve also seen the nature of how students are using AI begin to change because AI is not the same as Google. AI is not just “give me an answer.” AI will do things for you. It will synthesize, it will make a schedule, it will compare, it will actually fill out forms for you, and students are using all of those capabilities. We have a new survey that we just completed literally days ago of a few thousand more students. And so hopefully very soon we will be able to report on the results of those, and maybe that could be the kickoff meeting of this working group that we call together on everyone’s campus.

0:27:56.4 Val Fox: Yeah, I love that. The readout on AI adoption across student populations, we’ve been tracking that with graduate students as well, and it’s grown 5x in just the last year alone. And so digital channels have always played an outsized role, and I think we’re at an inflection point with all of these changes where schools that really lean into that and start orchestrating a broad kind of working group to tackle these issues because it’s not gonna be, again, it’s not gonna be the solopreneur sitting in the back office [chuckle] trying to recreate their own student prompts that’s gonna solve for this. It’s really gonna take a lot of hands with a lot of different skill sets to create the kind of content that’s gonna feed this. And I would suspect that where the puck is going is that the schools that, students are certainly, they’re gonna continue to consume content this way.

0:29:07.9 Val Fox: There’s no, we’re not, this is not gonna get unwound in any way. We’ll continue to see AI adoption just skyrocket. And I think the knock-on effects for that is schools that really don’t make the effort to start appearing, they’re not gonna make it into the consideration set. And practically speaking, that means they’re not gonna get the site visits or the down-funnel applications or enrollments, right? And so I really do think any school that cares about enrollments needs to really care about this very deeply.

0:29:47.0 Michael Koppenheffer: Yeah. Yeah, you make such a great point. I can’t actually believe we made it this far, but we haven’t yet talked about the difference between visibility and sentiment. So one of the things, so you have to be visible, but you also want the AI to be saying nice things about you. And one of the things that we found in our research with students is that students who used AI in their college search, about one in five of them actually took a school off their list because of something they learned on AI. Which, that should make everyone sit up and take notice, right? It’s like you want to be seen, but you actually should care very much about what the AIs are saying about you because it is influential.

0:30:30.6 Val Fox: Yeah. We don’t have a high tolerance for negative comments in this industry, right? We’re not e-commerce where it’s like the, “I didn’t like the color” or “the shoes didn’t fit.” We actually, in our monitoring dashboard, we actually monitor for sentiment. And I tell leaders all the time, this is really risk mitigation because if we find that there are negative claims being made about you online, this is a great opportunity to address that and isolate for that and also figure out, “Do we need to outrank it? Do we need to contact the author?” But I think it’s really important for as brand stewards that marketing leaders need to and their teams need to be on top of that. So I’m glad you brought up the sentiment piece because it’s real.

0:31:19.2 Michael Koppenheffer: Yeah, and you’re making me think about something even broader, which is I did not realize it going into AI visibility monitoring, but my favorite part of the entire exercise is not actually about the tactics. It’s about the strategic perspective you can get about your institution and its position in the market because in doing the monitoring, you’re not just learning about your institution. You’re learning about your competitors. You’re learning about the comparative results that your competitors get when you ask open-ended prompts. And that can be really eye-opening for some schools. Like, we’ve definitely seen some surprises, both in terms of the objective results and the comparative results that some of our partners are getting. And I’m hoping that that will actually be a tool for good in terms of institutional strategy and marketing strategy, that that will actually help focus efforts in a way that I think would be useful with or without AI, but these AI results give us a new way of looking at ourselves.

0:32:28.0 Val Fox: Yeah, I love that. I really think that the brand monitoring piece, so many schools wrestle with, how are we perceived? And this is an incredible, this kind of monitoring is an incredible tool to answer those questions.

0:32:53.5 Michael Koppenheffer: Yeah. So we could obviously talk about this for a few more hours, but I’m sure our listeners might have other things to do and maybe you do as well. But I guess in closing, do you have any advice for someone who’s listened to this podcast and has realized the importance of managing AI visibility but maybe hasn’t taken active steps on this yet? What would be the first thing you would do when you stopped listening, went back to your computer and started to work? If you were CMO Val back in your previous life.

0:33:31.3 Val Fox: Yeah, CMO Val. CMO Val would go back and think, again, with the lens of how are prospective students thinking about us? I’d want to know how we rank, right? So I think the first thing I’d do is, because I… As you did as well, helped inform some of the resources on our GEO dashboard page, but go to eab.com/geo and get access to some. There are great auditing tools that we can make available. You can get a free scan if you request one, but just understanding where your baseline is today is incredibly important because running that up the flagpole, I’ve seen so many leaders leave a conversation with us where the gaps are very real and very painful. And it’s a jumping off point to say we gotta do something about this. And so that, armed with a lot of the great trends and research that we can make available, I think really helps elevate why this should be a priority and how to get started.

0:34:35.7 Michael Koppenheffer: Seems like great advice. I mean, I…

0:34:41.7 Val Fox: What would you do?

0:34:44.5 Michael Koppenheffer: What would I do? I think I am with you. I think the first thing I’d want to do is understand the size and scope of the problem and the opportunity. And so if I didn’t have a tool available to me, I would get the solopreneur in my office to start running a series of prompts and look at what the results are and catalog them. But I think I would be looking for tools to help me do this at scale so that I could measure my baseline and start to measure my progress.

0:35:11.3 Val Fox: Exactly. Exactly. We have those tools available and I’d say start with just, we can do a quick custom scan, no strings attached. I would start there just to understand where your school sits today. And then that as a jumping off point, making the case to get access to the right kind of support that you need, whether it’s… Because it’s not gonna land on the back of one or two people. It just won’t, it won’t work that way. So I hope, I always feel like I’m a cheerleader for these teams that are working so hard. There’s no lack of priorities and requests that are usually flooding these people’s inboxes, but this is one that most teams are just not going to be equipped today to do on their own. So take advantage of some third-party resources and we’re always here to help.

0:36:03.2 Michael Koppenheffer: Great advice, Val, and I will second that offer. I love talking about AI visibility and marketing strategy in the age of AI, so always happy to chat if any of you all want to engage more. But we have come to the end of our episode of Office Hours. Val, I hope we get to do this again soon. We’ll see if we get invited back. But in the meantime, I wish you all great success in managing your AI visibility.

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