The Fastest Way to Show Up in AI Search (Without Rebuilding Your Entire SEO Strategy)
Prospective students are no longer “searching.” They’re asking. And the answers they get from AI tools are shaping their decisions long before they ever land on your website.
The data from Everspring is blunt: 45% of prospective students now use tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity in their college search, but only 13% verify anything they read by checking your site afterward . If you’re not visible in those AI-generated answers, you’re not in the consideration set.
AI isn’t reading your content the way humans do. It’s scanning for structure, clarity, and machine-readable signals. Most university websites simply aren’t built for that.
The good news? You don’t need a ground-up content overhaul. You can earn visibility by reformatting what you already have, not rewriting everything from scratch.
When I interviewed Mike Bell, Chief Marketing Officer at Everspring, he said it outright:
“AI isn’t just retrieving results — it’s assembling a narrative about your brand from whatever it finds. You’re essentially equipping this agent to advocate on your behalf. If the signals aren’t there, it will fill in the blanks for you.”
1. Start With the Easiest Win: Audit Your AI Answers Right Now
Before you touch a single page on your website, you need to know how AI is talking about you. According to Everspring’s report, AI Overviews now appear in 77% of long-tail searches — the same queries students use when they’re close to making decisions.
Run these prompts today in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overview:
“Best [program] for working adults”
“Affordable [degree] programs near me”
“Schools still accepting applications for [term]”
“Good alternatives to [your institution]”
“Is [your institution] a good school for [major]?”
You’re looking for four things:
Do you appear at all?
Is the description accurate?
Are competitors consistently cited instead of you?
Which sources does AI pull from?
Most institutions skip this step, but this is the new performance review. Consider it your AI-era rankings report and develop the habit of running it (and recording your findings) daily.
2. Fix the Formatting Before You Fix the Copy
This is where the quick wins live.
Much of the available research, including Everspring’s report, shows that AI favors long-tail questions and clearly structured content, not traditional SEO keyword blocks. If your content isn’t machine-friendly, it won’t surface in AI Overviews — even if you rank #1 in organic search.
Here’s the shortlist of fixes that move the needle fastest:
Turn Program Pages Into Q&A Format
AI is looking for direct answers to direct questions. Add on-page sections that mirror what students actually ask:
“How long does this program take?”
“What’s the total cost?”
“What careers do graduates get?”
“Is this program flexible for working adults?”
“When are the application deadlines?”
When AI sees clean question–answer structure, it can cite you directly.
Use Natural Language Headings
Headings should read like a student typed them.
Old way: “Program Duration Overview”
Use this instead: “How long does the program take to finish?”
Everspring found that AI Overviews trigger most often on queries with six or more words — natural language, not SEO-optimized fragments .
Add Schema Markup
Schema was always good SEO hygiene. Now it’s essential. AI engines rely on structured data to:
understand program formats
validate accreditation
identify tuition details
map prerequisites and outcomes
If you’re not using program-specific schema, your content becomes guesswork for AI and that guesswork leads to errors, omissions, or invisibility.
Eliminate Outdated Content
AI scrapes everything, including things you forgot existed! Old PDFs, 2018 tuition pages and inactive program descriptions abound.
AI is pulling from whatever it can index, not what you intend.
Old content doesn’t just clutter your site. It misinforms the systems shaping your brand.
3. Strengthen the Signals AI Relies On
Students used to click your site to verify what they saw in Google. Now? Your site is where they go to validate what AI already told them.
That flips the job of your content to stop trying to convince and start trying to confirm. To do that, you need to strengthen the signals AI pulls into summaries:
Add proof points AI can cite
accreditation
rankings (if meaningful)
employer partnerships
licensure outcomes
alumni success metrics
AI loves specifics. Be the source of them.
Align paid and organic messaging
Your SEM headlines should reinforce the same value propositions your website uses. In our podcast, Mike framed it clearly: visibility now depends on unifying your narrative across channels, not treating paid and organic as separate ecosystems.
Students don’t differentiate between channels anymore. And guess what? Neither do machines.
4. Rethink Intent, Because It’s Collapsing
Mike didn’t mince words.
“The idea of intent as we’ve always known it as marketers has changed forever. Period. End of sentence. I’ve been trained my entire marketing career to think of it as stages of a funnel — the awareness stage, the consideration stage, the advocacy after the fact. That is all one dialogue now. It’s collapsed. And I really truly think that’s the world we’re in now.”
Students aren’t climbing a funnel. They’re having a private conversation with an AI model:
“My GPA isn’t great — what schools will take me?”
“I want to change careers fast — what’s the best option?”
“I can’t afford a $60k program — what’s realistic for me?”
This is where your visibility matters most; students are starting with the vulnerable questions they won’t ask a counselor. And AI is assembling a narrative about your institution from whatever it finds.
If your story isn’t clear, consistent, and indexable, AI will fill the blanks with whatever it can scrape. That’s reputational risk at the point of decision.
5. Implement the “Next Semester, Not Next Year” Plan
Here’s the exact sequence a CMO can use to get real movement before the next term:
Week 1: Audit
Run 15–20 core prompts
Document accuracy, frequency, and sources
Identify the biggest gaps (programs missing, errors, misaligned messaging)
Weeks 2–4: Reformat
Convert 3–5 highest-value pages to Q&A
Add schema
Update outdated content
Rewrite headings for natural-language queries
Month 2: Strengthen Signals
Add missing data points
Align paid headlines with organic messaging
Update third-party profiles (huge for AI credibility)
Month 3: Monitor + Expand
Re-run prompts
Track movement
Move to the next tranche of programs
This is exactly how one institution in Everspring’s report jumped from 6% to 51% AI Overview visibility in three months — not by writing more content, but by structuring existing content for AI inclusion .
What This Means for CMOs
You now market through an intermediary. An AI agent is interpreting your brand — for better or worse — before a human ever does.
Your job is to give that agent the clearest, cleanest, most unambiguous version of your story. Do that, and your visibility returns.
Ignore it, and you’ll be invisible at the exact moment students make decisions.