The New Local Advantage: How AI Search Is Reshaping Student Discovery and Enrollment

Catch the key takeaways

As AI search reshapes how students discover and evaluate schools, enrollment marketers are rethinking what visibility actually means. Our recent Amsive Education webinar explored what it looks like to build a discoverability strategy around the signals AI actually uses, not just web traffic and paid search.

Here are four takeaways to help make your institution more discoverable, trusted, and considered in this new search environment.

1. Students form opinions before they reach your website

The research journey has compressed. Students are using LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini to get program recommendations, campus comparisons, and peer reviews before they click on a school’s URL. By the time they arrive on your site, many have already decided whether you’re worth considering.

That makes traditional web traffic metrics an incomplete picture. A school can be getting steady visits while losing consideration at a stage it never sees.

2. Local schools can outrank national brands in AI search

Nearly 70% of students attend school within 50 miles of home. AI systems weigh local relevance heavily, which means a regional school with complete, accurate, location-specific information can surface above a national competitor for the right query.

AI doesn’t know you’re local unless you tell it. That requires deliberately documenting your location, departments, programs, and community connections across your Google Business Profile, departmental listings, and program pages.

3. Your Google Business Profile is doing more work than you think

LLMs pull from Google Business Profiles when assembling answers to student queries. Missing departments, unverified listings, and sparse descriptions all create openings that AI fills with a competitor’s information instead.

Each department should have its own verified listing, a corresponding page on your website, and enough detail to answer the questions a prospective student or parent might ask: program specifics, class schedules, locations, faculty.

4. Reviews are a discovery asset, not just a reputation metric

AI surfaces reviews directly in search results, often without being asked. Review recency matters. The content of the review matters. Negative reviews that go unanswered send their own signal.

Schools that actively generate reviews, respond to all of them, and understand the themes being surfaced will appear more consistently when students are comparing options in AI-driven search.

FAQs

What’s the first thing a school should do to improve AI visibility?

Audit your Google Business Profile. Log into the backend and check whether all departments are listed, whether those listings are verified, and whether the descriptions are complete. If departments are missing or unverified, that’s where to start.

Then check whether each listing has a corresponding page on your website, because a listing with no linked page gives AI less to work with.

For program pages, verify they’re being indexed by Google at all. Pages that aren’t crawled won’t appear in AI results regardless of how good the content is.

How do reviews affect where a school shows up in AI search?

LLMs pull review content directly into answers. When a student searches for nursing programs nearby, AI may surface what past students said about a school’s faculty, campus, or outcomes without the student asking for reviews at all. Review recency is also a ranking factor: a school with recent, specific reviews is more likely to appear than one with reviews from three years ago.

Responding to all reviews, including negative ones, signals to AI how an institution engages with its community. Schools that only respond to four- and five-star reviews leave the negative ones to speak on their own.

Can a small vocational school realistically compete with a large university in AI search?

Yes, specifically on local queries. AI is designed to surface the most relevant answer to a specific question, and relevance is often local. A regional trade school with complete departmental listings, strong community ties, and recent student reviews can outperform a national institution for searches like “welding certification near me evenings” because its information is more specific and its local signals are stronger.

The schools most at risk are those assuming brand recognition will carry them into AI results without any additional work.

How should a school with multiple campuses approach AI visibility?

Each campus should have its own Google Business Profile, and each department within a campus should have its own listing under that profile. The website pages linked to those listings need to be specific to the location, not templated copies with the city name swapped out.

That means describing what’s physically at each campus: the programs offered there, the facilities, the faculty, what’s in the surrounding area. AI looks for location-specific content to confirm that a school’s presence in a particular place is real and relevant to the student’s search.

Dive Into the Transcript

Joe Woll (00:09):

Welcome in everybody. Thanks for joining us for our webinar. I see participants growing a litle bit, so I’m going to give just one more second before we dive in. Awesome. So today we’re going to talk about the new local advantage, how AI search is reshaping student discovery and enrollment.

We’re going to hold a Q&A at the end, so feel free to shoot us your questions at any point in the presentation and at the end we’ll get through as many as we can. And also don’t worry about taking notes. We’re going to send the recording out afterwards, so should be all good there. Just hang out and listen and send us your questions.

So before we get started, I wanted to introduce myself. I’m Joe Wall, a director of business development here at Amsive and I’m joined by two of my colleagues who are going to walk us through what they are seeing in this new search environment.

Joel, Bambi, say hello.

Joel Espinoza (01:14):

Hi, everyone. My name is Joel Espinoza. I have 15 years in higher ed marketing and I specialize in multicultural studies. Excited to be here.

Bambi Frazier (01:23):

Hello. I am Bambi Frazier. I’m the director of local visibility and growth here at Amsive and also a Google Business Profile product expert and super excited to dive in today.

How AI Is Changing the Student Discovery Journey

Joe Woll (01:36):

Alright. Well, with that, let’s get into it. So for years enrollment marketers, the focus for enrollment marketers was getting found in search engines and then driving prospective students to their websites to learn more. But today students are increasingly forming opinions, building shortlists and getting recommendations before they even visit a school’s website. How’s that happening? Yes, we’re talking about AI search as everybody has been for the last two years.

But with voice chat, rapid response and the conversational nature of it all, students are finding these experiences increasingly useful in the early stages of their decision journey. And for enrollment marketers, well, the question for us isn’t whether students can find the school. It’s whether the AI system is actually including the school in the conversations they’re having with students at all. And so that’s why we’re here today.

We want to talk about why local visibility and AI discoverability are becoming one connected strategy for schools and what enrollment leaders can do now to make sure their institutions are found, trusted, and considered in this new search environment.

So let’s start with the big picture. Joel, you’ve been in the enrollment game for many, many years. What’s actually changing in the way prospective students are discovering and evaluating their schools?

Joel Espinoza (03:05):

Sure, absolutely. We all know that student journeys change over time. We also know that students will do a lot of research, but what’s happening now is students are conducting more independent research. AI is compressing that research journey. So they’re no longer spending a lot of time searching Google. They’re spending time on these LLM, these chatbots to give them information at their fingertips. But moreover, we’re also seeing that prospect students are going to social media and other video platforms to get student testimonials.

They get POVs, point of views on different subjects, including campus, programs, teachers, curriculums, et cetera. So peer-driven research is really helping students arrive with preferences before they have even visited your website. That’s very big because institutions may lose consideration even before visiting your site, meaning that somebody already has an opinion on your program, your school, your studies before they hit your website.

Think of how impactful that is. Traditional web traffic metrics don’t tell a whole story anymore because of your total traffic, many of them may have already learned so much about you before getting to your website.

Joe Woll (04:35):

So Bambi, when you are looking at this from a search and visibility perspective being our local search guru as it were, what are you seeing?

Bambi Frazier (04:44):

Well, you see it there. 31% of Gen Z is starting their query using AI or chat tools. That’s 31%. And it feels like AI as it relates to search kind of just got here. So that number’s probably going to continue to grow. The other thing is when they do those searches, they aren’t typically searching just with keywords anymore, meaning it’s not just one or two words to search. It’s much more conversational now as if they are having a conversation with that LLM, which is large language model, which is ChatGPT, Gemini, those types of tools.

So they’re asking more complex contextual questions. So it’s not just nursing school near me or nursing degree or automotive school near me or night school. Now it’s what schools offer night schools for a nursing degree, much more conversational as if you were talking to an actual human being. Then what happens is the AI systems assemble the answer in a super easy to read summary and that’s culminated from multiple sources.

It’s not just the blue link that we have been seeing that we’ve been so used to seeing over the years in the traditional search results. And now because of that, your school becoming visible, it now depends on whether or not AI understands and trusts your school.

So after the student does the search, and this is what Joel just touched on, they’re getting their answers before they even have to scroll through any real results because it’s all summarized, quick and easy right there for them. It’s from multiple sources and you may not make the cut unless you are immediately visible at the very top of those search results.

The Local Advantage in AI Search

Joe Woll (06:36):

I think a term we hear a lot is zero click searches, and that’s very much in this case. But as it’s always been the case with Google and appearing at the top of search results, the assumptions often you got to be big and you got to be able to pack a punch to be at the top there. But is that possible for smaller schools? Is that possible for vocational schools or do I have to be a major brand to appear in AI results? What do you think about that, Joel?

Joel Espinoza (07:08):

To be honest. Yeah, to be honest, traditional search often favored scale, large budgets, lots of keywords, lots of ad groups. Yes. Traditional search favored the giants, but AI is increasingly favoring relevance. AI is shifting from the battleground on who is the biggest to who is the most relevant. So think about this. Most students still attend school close to home. Nearly 70% go to a school within 50 miles and think about that.

And that’s even stronger when we have some sensitivity with career-focused individuals, lower income, and first-gen students. Local institutions often have stronger connections to the community. Regional relevance can now weigh national brands. The thing is that there’s an advantage there that has to be taken care of and has to be addressed because local advantage is going to play a bigger role in search visibility, AI visibility.

Bambi Frazier (08:11):

It is. And where institutions can lean into that is if they are providing the signals that it takes to be visible in AI-driven search results. What you have to understand is AI isn’t going to just understand that you’re local because it’s a machine. You have to teach it.

You have to actively document everything about your school to make yourself relevant and lean into the fact that visibility isn’t going to just happen. It has to be intentional for you to be visible in local search and in searches that are AI driven. We’re talking, like I said, ChatGPT, AI mode, AI reviews. You have to be intentional if that’s where you want your institution to land.

Relevance: Why Specific Information Beats Broad Messaging

Joe Woll (09:10):

And that’s really what we’re going for today is that intentionality no longer is it just the case of being big and having a ton of students and a bunch of different programs just gets you to the top of search results. The good news is that even if you don’t have that scale, there’s so much opportunity here now, you just have to work for it. What we’re going to talk about today is how you can take the important things that AI looks at and translate them into your marketing strategy.

So really we’ll get to the point of when AI is deciding to surface and recommend certain schools, how are they doing that? And already Bambi has kind of hit on a couple of them. You’ll hear relevance. You’ve heard trust. We’re going to go through these four signals in order. And first we’re going to start with relevance.

So how does AI determine whether a school is relevant to a student’s needs? Joel, what do you think?

Joel Espinoza (10:15):

Sure. Student searches are becoming more specific. So career outcomes matter. Program fit matters. AI is matching needs, not keywords. They’re searching for schools and they’re searching for solutions. Broad messaging here is becoming less effective. Specificity is becoming the competitive advantage. I want to address a couple of things when we talk about being very specific and very deliberate.

Many schools have PDFs that are embedded in their websites and that information is just not read. That may include program detail, course curriculums, calendars, financial information, et cetera, disclosures and many more things.

Those things are just simply not picked up by the LLMs. So when we think about somebody searching, some might be motivated by price, cost, length, program fit, reviews, et cetera. That information is just not going to be specific enough for them if it’s on a PDF. But you also have to look at other mining props, look at how people are searching for these things, including college calendars, working with career centers to share information.

That information’s going to be valuable when an answer engine or like a ChatGPT is going to give them information on their perception of the school. And remember, the more the student prospects use these LLMs, these chatbots, the more they personalize them for them. So it’s important to know that these chatbots are working for the students, not necessarily for the institutions because they’re trying to give them the most relevant information available.

Joe Woll (12:06):

I like the PDF one. I see that all the time with schools. You’ve been in an organization for many, many years. You have to have some relevant and impactful materials. They may just not be digital yet. They can be digital. They can be more accessible. So that’s a nice quick win. Bambi, what else do you see when you work with schools where there’s relevancy gaps?

Bambi Frazier (12:26):

Oh, by the way, I’ll just add in. Those PDFs, they need to be found on LLMs, but they can be optimized for search as well. Don’t forget that. We can optimize the heck out of a PDF. It’s just one of those little missed opportunities that we see when we look at different websites. But your question, another gap you heard me say earlier on that I’m a Google Business Profile product expert. Incomplete Google Business Profiles, also known as GBPs.

GBPs are very much underutilized and a lot of institutions don’t know that they can have a department listing in addition to the main Google Business Profile account. So they’re kind of nested underneath one another and it can be a game changer if somebody is searching for a department or a degree or a certificate that you provide and then you have that existing Google Business profile.

Something else I want you to think about. I want you to go to your Google Business Profile, log in. If you have departments listed there, are they all verified? Are there missing departments? A lot of people come to us and they say, “Well, I don’t know what to do with it. It’s not verified.” Well, that’s something that you can work on directly with your SEO team, your marketing team, with Google support. It can be done because we’ve done it before.

Missing descriptions on your existing Google business profiles. Those are being used by LLMs to understand more about your school, what you offer and where you offer it. So if you have those missing department listings, look into that. Work on getting those added to your Google Business Profile account. Also, in each one of those listings, in each one of your Google Business profiles, you should have a page on your website that corresponds with it.

So Google can make that connection and so LLMs can make the connection of, “Oh, this is what they’re offering.” Those departmental pages, or they can be location pages talking about what you offer and where those should be very robust. With all the technical elements like schema, you should have FAQs on there. Any program specific content when classes are offered, where they’re offered, are they offered on different campuses?

All that information should be on the pages, but it all starts with your Google Business profiles. If you haven’t logged into your GBP lately, I highly encourage you to do that because that is the foundation of your local visibility when it comes to ranking and search engines and showing up on those LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini and all the others.

Joe Woll (15:01):

So that’s quite a list, guys, that you just gave everybody on this call to go think about. It’s been a busy semester. We’re finally in the summer, maybe some people are looking ahead to Independence Day holiday next weekend. What are you suggesting somebody does first? They leave this webinar, they got a few days left. What are they going to do before the break?

Joel Espinoza (15:20):

Yeah, that’s a great question, Joe. I think the first thing that should be done is, especially if you haven’t done anything, is understand what your student prospects are actually asking. Look at your Google search console. Look at what’s actually bringing students to your website today. Look at which keywords or keyword strings. And this is all readily available in your search console, but also look at what people also ask within that structure and see what other things are being asked by individuals similarly. You can also use a site like alsoask.com.

That gives you an ability to see if somebody searches for a certain program, it’ll actually spit out many different ways of how somebody will ask a certain question inside an LLM. This is really essential to understand because remember, students are not us. We’re much older. They are searching in a much different way. They consume content in a different way.

So don’t ever think that you’re optimizing it for yourself. Unless you are trying to attract a 40 something year old freshman, you want to see how they’re actually searching for this. You also want to make sure that when you do that, you can map the student intent to programs. Meaning you take all the ways somebody can search for something and start mapping it visually so you can have a game plan on how you’re going to become much more visible for these LLMs.

Joe Woll (16:51):

Bambi, what would you do first?

Bambi Frazier (16:54):

I touched on it already. Audit your Google Business profiles. Log in, look in the backend setting. There are fields upon fields in there. They’re not in there just for fun. As much as we want to think, “Oh, that’s not that important to fill that out. ” No, I beg. Get in there and audit your Google Business profiles. Are all of your departments listed on your Google Business profile? If they are not, reach out for help. If you’re having trouble getting them verified, reach out for help and support. It is an investment that will pay for itself in enrollments.

Audit your program pages, your degree pages, your departmental pages. Make sure those are as robust as possible. Give prospective students, give parents, give the LLMs and give the search engines all the information that they need to know that they could possibly wonder, that they could possibly ask about what it is that your school is offering and at the local level exactly where it’s being offered.

You have to use tools to look at your visibility. Are those pages even being indexed? They might not be indexed. We find it often where very valuable pages on a website aren’t even being crawled by Google. So you think they’re going to show up in AI if they’re not being crawled by Google and audit on your entire website and on your Google business profile. Treat those like siblings, make them go hand in hand and that investment will pay for itself.

Joe Woll (18:18):

I like that. Yeah. It’s two websites. It’s your Google Business is your second website. You have to care about it just the same.

Joel Espinoza (18:25):

That’s right.

Proximity: Teaching AI Where Your School Matters

Joe Woll (18:26):

So we fill in all these relevancy gaps with all these helpful insights you guys provided. But next we want to talk about how AI understands where a school in question matters. And for that, we’re going to shift to proximity as our next signal.

So one of the most interesting findings in this space is what we talked a little bit about earlier that students are attending school relatively close to home. And so we are thinking about it from a discoverability standpoint of reaching students who are nearby. And how is AI thinking about it? Joel, I know you have some insights here on proximity and AI.

Joel Espinoza (19:13):

Yeah, absolutely. Listen, students still face real world constraints. They have family obligations, work schedules, commute considerations, cost considerations. As AI is personalizing these recommendations around those realities, students may search regionally, nationally, but they often choose locally.

So when you think about you can’t compete with a national school in AI, you can’t compete with one of these big juggernauts that you see advertising like crazy. That’s actually far from the case because in search visibility, local relevance will matter to them.

Joe Woll (19:55):

And how do we trumpet that local relevance of our school, Bambi? Where should we go? What should we do?

Bambi Frazier (20:00):

You know what I’m going to say. Google Business Profile. Sorry, I get out with

Joe Woll (20:04):

It. It’s almost like that’s important. Is that coming through for everybody else, how important Google Business Profile is? Because it’s pretty important.

Bambi Frazier (20:12):

It’s hugely important. And I like to joke and say that I have a name. I have a parking place at Google Business Profile headquarters because I’m there all the time. It’s where I live. My second home is like my little vacation home, but not really. Google Business Profile, this is the foundation of your online presence for your school. It’s the foundation. How do you not do it? Well, it’s not too late. You can absolutely start.

So get in there and really add every possible field that is if it’s empty. Get in there and optimize it to the max. There are little nooks and crannies in there that you’re going to look at and you’re going to go, “Does that really matter?” Well, if you don’t know the answer, ask. But they matter. They’re there for a reason. Like I said, they’re not there just for fun.

So Google Business Profile is hugely important. Also, it’s a ranking factor proximity. Proximity to location is huge. There was an algorithm update that was done, I’m going to say maybe about two years ago where where you’re sitting at this very moment, if you do a search that has local intent, you’re going to get results that are much closer to you.

I wrote a blog a couple weeks ago and when I used AI, when I switched over to AI mode after doing a search that was like a local intent search about schools near me and what they’re offering, it actually said in AI, and I’m going to summarize this, if this school wasn’t giving you what you need, here are some competitors. I was shocked because I thought, wow, I didn’t even ask for the competitors, but it sure served them up. And you want to know why?

Because the competitors were better answering my prompt than what that school was that I was specifically looking for. So Google Business Profile, departmental listings. Also think about, you see it on screen, think about the different directories where your school might be listed Apple Business, Bing Places. These are hugely important where your school is listed where kids are searching, their parents are searching to find what your school has to offer.

So think about that. Proximity to location. Maps matter. It matters in traditional search and it matters when it comes to AI-driven searches. Location pages or departmental pages on your website, those matter. The content on those pages matter. Gone are the days of just having the name of the department and the address and the building number, the building name that it’s in and you move on, that page is up. That page needs to be much more robust because think about this.

If you’re not putting the time and the effort into providing the most up-to-date, robust, accurate information about your school and its offerings on the pages that are supposed to be about all of the above, if you don’t care, why should the LMs care enough to reward you with visibility? Why should the search engines care enough to reward you with the visibility? But it’s not too late to start if you haven’t already.

That’s the big takeaway. And for you schools that are local that are depending on local visibility, you have an advantage. Your advantage is where your campus is located. Lean into that and optimize those Google Business profiles and the pages on your website that pair with each one of those departments.

Joe Woll (23:32):

So kind of feels like good news, bad news. There’s a lot of opportunity, but it requires a lot of work potentially depending on where you are in your local AI discoverability journey as an enrollment team. But it feels like no matter how small the school or what your local footprint is versus national, I should feel pretty optimistic about my opportunities here. Am I understanding that right?

Bambi Frazier (23:56):

I think you should feel optimistic about it because here’s the thing AI is new. It hasn’t been around forever. So even if you’re behind, you’re not that far behind and it’s not too late to catch up. So if you’re not doing the work yet, it’s okay to start doing the work now because that means that you understand that AI is not going to automatically discover you.

The work that you do to become visible in AI-driven searches, when a student goes in and types a prompt into one of these LLMs, the work that you need to do needs to be very intentional. It can no longer be an afterthought because AI is here, the prompts are changing, the search landscape is changing, but the key is that it’s never too late to get started.

Joel Espinoza (24:46):

That’s a great point, Bambi. The opportunity exists, but schools have to earn it. And that’s been the name of the game for a long time. These Google and these other players, they want you to participate, but nothing’s ever free. Nothing’s ever easy.

Trust: Why Third-Party Signals Outweigh Institutional Messaging

Joe Woll (25:05):

And I like Bambi’s point too because it’s always an evolving resource. These LLMs, same as Google, they want us to get the best results when we’re the user and so they’re going to continue to improve how they serve up results every day or we’re going to stop using them. So we need to stay on top of it. And I think that’s a really good point. So now we’re going to shift to our third signal. Just to give kind of a status check, we’ve filled in our relevancy gaps.

There’s no way the AI tools don’t know everything about our school. We’ve amplified our proximity to all the different students who are nearby looking to enroll and now we need to establish trust. Just like Google for the last 20 or so years, AI is looking for proof that we are actually a trustworthy organization. So can you guys talk about trust and the way of AI ranking signal, peering signal?

What are they looking for to trust a reputable organization?

Joel Espinoza (26:12):

Absolutely. I think when you think about how students are going to rely on validation, they increase their reliance on validation. AI reflects this behavior. AI is going to help them make those informed decisions. Third-party signals matter more than self-promotion. If we think about the first signal where I said that students will have an opinion before they visit your site, this trust area is far more important because of that third party signal. That matters more than self-promotion.

You can promote, you can advertise so much about yourself, but unless that student finds that validation elsewhere, they will not have that trust. And so if you think about how this is playing out, trust has become distributed, especially social media, video platforms, anywhere where these individuals are consuming content and distributing content.

Bambi Frazier (27:15):

And I think that that’s probably at least with the work I do most relevant when it comes to reviews. We’ve dug our heels in doing a lot of research on how reviews impact online visibility when it comes to institutions. Reviews are huge. You don’t even have to ask for reviews. We’ll do test searches. We’ll use the tools to see reviews about … I’m in the Washington DC area, so I’ll say reviews about Georgetown University. But if you do other searches related to Georgetown University, like things to do near Georgetown University, the reviews about things to do in the area will come up.

And I didn’t ask for reviews, but it will serve up reviews. If you do a search for a school and you switch over to AI mode or you switch over to, or you get the AI overview, sometimes you’ll have pros and cons served up and it will pull reviews from other sources, including Google Business Profile, word for word, reviews that are related to the prompt or the query that you typed into that search bar or into that LLM.

The themes of reviews matter. It’ll say students say that the cafeteria food is delicious. Or it might say, oh, students say that this professor for this department isn’t that great, but they do say good things about campus activities. It’ll give you things that you didn’t necessarily ask for. So the takeaway when it comes to trust is that you have to be intentional about asking. So you can’t always control what somebody says, but you can control the effort you put in to generate more reviews.

Review recency matters heavily. LLMs want the most up-to-date information. And even on Google, if you’re doing a traditional search, review recency can impact your rankings online as it relates to how visible your school is. The content in the review matters. There are keywords in the review that matter. So if somebody’s asking about campus activities and then somebody leaves a review about campus activities, that review about campus activities will be surfaced in the LLMs or in the search results.

And also as you’re getting these new reviews in, responding to the reviews matters. We see businesses after businesses and schools after schools that even when they are responding to reviews, sometimes they’re only responding to the best reviews, right? Only the four and five star reviews and they just kind of hope the negative reviews will go away, not a good strategy.

You need to respond to the negative reviews as well so you can show students and parents that you care about what negative things and negative experiences people are having at your school and those things need to be addressed. You can show that you’re addressing what might be negative. Also, think about citations. We talked about maps. Citations in my world are the same thing as directories. So like we said, Apple Maps, yellow pages, you might think, well, why do we care about Yellow Pages?

Well, it’s an online directory. Those things matter. Local press. So is the school being mentioned in the media? Those are trust signals if LLMs can source third party sites about your school. So make sure that that effort is intentional as well. And then also when it comes to your involvement, being involved in the community. When you’re involved in the community, your name gets mentioned online. So that’s also important as well. So if somebody’s mentioning your school on their website, the LLMs will be able to source that as well. It impacts trust.

Joe Woll (30:51):

I think too, Bambi, you brought up a really good point about the types of prompts here because AI loves devil’s advocacy. It always will say a good thing and then a bad thing. And so even if all your reviews, most of them are good, a little of them are bad. You try to ignore the bad ones.

You want to be aware of what the devil advocacy could be about your university from those reviews and that social proof because all these LLMs right now are too scared to give direct recommendations, so they’re going to share that information. So just knowing what’s out there about your own institution is huge just from that perspective alone.

Bambi Frazier (31:33):

It’s huge and it’s important to know that reviews aren’t just about a reputation and it’s no longer just a reputation asset. They’re also now discovery assets. So reviews are going to help your school to be found online.

Joel Espinoza (31:50):

Absolutely. Connect reviews back to student decision making. In any business, people rely on reviews. So why wouldn’t students do this for schools? Students trust student experiences more than institutional messaging. Let me repeat that. Students trust student experiences more than institutional messaging.

Evidence: Making Your School’s Outcomes Findable

Joe Woll (32:14):

And I think that’s a perfect segue because there’s still an onus on institutions to have the right messaging about why they are a great school. So even if a student does trust those experiences more, AI is still reliant on what you have to say about yourself as a great institution. And that’s our next signal is evidence. And so we can play both sides.

We can make sure students understand the great experiences that are available to them, but then also AI understands as well. And so let’s probe on that a little bit more. What is the difference between just being a great institution on your own and actually being recognized by AI as a great institution?

Joel Espinoza (32:58):

That’s a great question. As someone that goes coast to coast visiting schools of all sizes of all types, I often hear the phrase, well, if we get the students here or if we talk to them, we’ll tell them how great we are, the great things that we do. The problem is LLMs aren’t traveling. They don’t have suitcases to travel coast to coast. They are picking up whatever’s available online. And so outcomes must be visible. Partnerships must be visible. Community impact must be visible.

Success stories have to be visible. The schools that win won’t necessarily create more content, they’ll create more evidence. There’s a lot of evidence out there for these schools, but it has to be found. It’s got to be put in a way that the LLMs are going to find it. And the reason for that is Bambi said it earlier. An LLM might say,” I know you’re looking for this school, but this other school, they do this, this, and this.

It seems like a better fit for you. “You want to avoid that type of suggestivenes when you have the same, if not more evidence.

Bambi Frazier (34:11):

That’s right. And so you’re probably thinking,” Well, where do I get this evidence? How are we supposed to do this? “Well, it’s probably right there at your fingertips. Think about the things that your school is doing to partner in the community.

If it’s employers, if it’s students doing clinical rotations, getting placed in certain healthcare businesses, externships, internships, where are they getting placed? Where do you already have those relationships in place where information about partnering with you might be published online? What are some student outcomes?

People love a student success story. Where are those stories being published online and where are those students landing after they get that certificate or that degree or that license through your school? Another good one is community involvement. I want to also say a lot of the things that we’re talking about here, these are strategies to help foster your online visibility when it comes to these large language models, but all of this is rooted in search engine optimization.

All of these things we’re talking about, if you have a great SEO strategy, then that will segue seamlessly and beautifully into becoming visible in these LLMs. You might just need to foster it a little bit more so you can answer those different questions and be more intentional about fostering those relationships in the community.

Do you have local awards? Have you won awards for the great things that you do? Do you have people at your school that are keynote speakers at events or that are communicating with other organizations? A big one, local media coverage.

Fun fact, I used to be a morning news anchor in my home state of West Virginia and in Savannah, Georgia. News stations love good stories. They love feel good stories. They love this coverage. They love to hear about it. Are you sending out press releases when you’re involved in a community event?

That’s one of the best ways to get featured, especially on TV. Even if you’re in a smaller market, they’re dying for stories, good feel good stories to publish about community involvement. This is one of the ways that you can do it. If your school is participating in events outside of the school, you’re placing students in certain areas, you have different partnerships, make sure that’s getting documented online somewhere and you have to be intentional about that outreach.

If you’re not documenting it, if you’re not documenting what your school is doing, AI I can guarantee will find someone else who is. And what’s a little more frustrating about it is that information that AI is hungry for, it might serve up information that might not always be accurate. It’s up to you to make sure that you’re visible, that it’s documented, and most important that the information online about your school is accurate.

Joel Espinoza (37:01):

And this is where smaller institutions can outperform larger competitors is making the connection between your school and the local at large community, having all of that be accurate. And the way Bambi said, consider, do you want the information coming from your information or from some third-party site giving possibly incorrect information?

Where AI Search Is Headed in Higher Education

Joe Woll (37:30):

All right. So a lot of information, a lot of signals. I’m going to make these guys break out their crystal balls now and give us a few predictions. So if we’re going to fast-forward two years, got our associate’s degree, what’s different? Where are we looking for AI search and just discoverability experiences for students in two years?

Bambi Frazier (37:52):

I think it’s going to be more of what we are seeing now. So the way this has started with less about what we would call in the SEO world, short tail keywords, it’s now going to continue and it’s going to evolve into much more conversational search. If you think about it, think a couple of years ago when you would use Siri or Alexa, you would call out whatever it is that you wanted and you would say it in a sentence. Well, that’s where we are now.

That’s our reality now when it comes to search engines and LLMs is we are doing prompts and doing searches that are much more conversational. And by the way, we are being prompted to do that. Google Maps rolled out a few months ago a new feature called Ask Maps. What will say, tell me about what you’re looking for.

Ask me about things to do in the area. And it wants you to have a conversation. So you know what happens? We do. And it’s no longer the keywords that get the school ranked. It’s the completeness of your information online that allows you to be recommended when it comes to the students and the parents that are doing their research about your school.

So I would say go into your Google Business Profiles, look at your website, audit everything. I think it’s going to be more of what it is now but on a much deeper level. And I would also heavily recommend that you focus on review generation. That matters. It matters in local search. It matters when somebody is searching in maps, it matters in traditional search. And yes, it matters when it comes to the LLMs. It’s huge. So just think just because I’m small doesn’t mean that I can’t run with the big dogs.

You can because you have that local piece that has the same standards as the schools at the regional and at the state level. Lean in to that local level, lean into that local online visibility that you have and it will absolutely feed into your online visibility at the regional level, at the local level, and most importantly, statewide as well.

Joel Espinoza (40:17):

So remember, these are predictions. I think that AI visibility becomes a standard enrollment KPI. Visibility will become more important than traffic per se. Because again, think about where we’re at right now where many people have an informed decision about your institution before the traffic comes to your website. I think that we’re moving towards a visibility index or ranking rather than how much traffic we get. Consideration sets are increasingly built before the website visit.

So think again, how that’s changing the student journey and institutions focus more on discoverability than on ranking. So how visible are you? And we’re talking about that now, but two years into this conversation, we’ll be talking more about how discoverable you are rather than how you’re ranking. And then schools that ignore AI lose visibility even if they maintain current traffic. So you might be getting traffic. And on a previous presentation, we talked about rented space in paid advertising.

Schools that lose AI ranking and visibility are going to really see the net fall of the discoverability index because paid media and dependency on paid channels can only take you so far. The world and student journeys is moving towards the AI searchability. And so you want to be able to rank and be discovered by those models. So again, schools that lose AI ignore AI are going to lose in the long run and that’s a prediction.

Joe Woll (42:09):

Thank you both for going out on a ledge and we’ll check back in two years and see how right you guys are. But seriously, let’s close with something practical. We’ve talked a lot about where we’re seeing the search environment right now and I think that hopefully from this discussion, we’re all able on this call to answer these five questions about our institutions.

So I’m just going to read them through really quickly:

• Does ChatGPT surface your school? Are programs in your local profiles?
• By profiles, we mean Google Business, Bing Places, Apple Business, formerly Apple Business Connect. Do reviews reflect real outcomes?
• Are local partners talking about you, that local media coverage, for example, that Bambi trumpeted before?
• Can AI find proof of student success?

So if you have answered no to three or more of these questions, it might just not be a search visibility problem.

It might be something bigger and we would call this maybe a consideration problem. These are all core elements of a great institution and discoverability and there’s a lot of opportunity here if you’re hitting no on three or more of these.

So as we close and right before we get to the Q&A, I want to make sure we have some time for those questions. I want to give these guys one more chance. Joel, Bambi, what’s the one thing? Everyone’s signing off in 15 minutes. What do they need to remember of everything we shared today?

Bambi Frazier (43:51):

I’ve got two. Can I give two?

Joe Woll (43:55):

I said one.

Bambi Frazier (43:56):

No, sorry. No. I’ll mesh them. I’ll marry them. How about that? AI discoverability, it’s not just going to happen. Don’t expect it to just happen. Enrollments are too important to your school to leave being visible in AI to chance. Lean into your Google Business profiles. That was my number two.

Lean into your Google Business profiles in those departmental and those program pages to feed the LLMs and to feed your online visibility. It will not happen on its own. It has to be an intentional effort by you and your team.

Joe Woll (44:37):

Joel, what’s your one thing?

Joel Espinoza (44:39):

If there’s anything to remember from this, it’s that students cannot choose you or learn about you if AI never considers you.

Q&A

Joe Woll (44:51):

And I don’t know any better way to end it than there. We’re not changing how students look for schools, it’s just changing where they’re finding their information. And that is an opportunity for everybody on this call to be a part of that conversation when maybe they weren’t able to before in traditional search. All right. Well, thank you everybody. We are going to start going through the Q&A right now. First, feel free to continue to submit questions even if you haven’t yet.

It’s still open, but we have a couple I’m going to start with and for Joel, this question is for you. So in Texas, they are no longer able to have PDFs on their websites unless they’re completely accessible. So this institution in question is getting rid of most of them on their website and they’re not allowing new ones just because the accessibility piece can be a lot of work along with state requirements.

So are other states having the same issue or is this a trend you’ve been hearing rumors about as we work with universities and schools?

Joel Espinoza (46:06):

Yeah, that’s a great question. Generally, we’re seeing that it’s starting with higher ed. Some schools, there aren’t any extreme mandates like in Texas, but we’re seeing states like California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, and others that are having very similar issues where the PDFs have to be extremely accessible or they have to be outright taken out.

So you’re not alone. It’s moving in that way, but I wouldn’t see it as say an issue. I see it as an opportunity. If you have to remove your PDFs, find a way to create synergy with them so that they’re not only being placed on your website, but they’re also being picked up by the LLMs.

Joe Woll (46:51):

Can they be unique landing pages on your site? If that content is relevant, can they be a URL instead of a PDF? Awesome. Next question. This one’s for you, Bambi. So for schools that have a lot of departmental listings in their Google Business profiles, but most of them are unverified.

The Google verification process, I’m sure we’ve all had experience with can be a little bit of an undertaking. What do we do? What’s the best way forward? You’ve convinced me it’s important, but this is a lot of work.

Bambi Frazier (47:26):

Yeah, it is. It’s absolutely a lot of work. We actually worked with Pace University in New York. They had a very similar issue where they had their main Google business profile for the school, but when you logged into their Google Business profile, it was just a sea of unverified and they were through with it. They didn’t have time to deal with it. So they reached out to us, they said, “Can you help us get these verified?” And I’m going to be honest, it was a marathon.

It certainly was not a sprint to get them all verified, but we did it. And that in some of these cases takes what is called bulk verification where you work closely with a point person at Google support and they put you through their checks and balances where you have to send them images. You have to show them that, yes, this department really is here.

You have to show them the signage for that department. Some of the issues we came, they would say, “Well, we don’t have signage.” And I would have to say, “Well, you have to put up signage.” It has to show the name of the building. And it might not be on the building, it might be on a sign in front of the building, but you have to show that to get verified. If your departments are non-existent or if they are not verified, I highly encourage you to get them added to your Google Business Profile and go through the verification process.

If you need support, that’s when you will reach out to somebody at Google Support who can walk you through the process. Sometimes it can be a little daunting, but then that’s when you have your SEO team and your Google Business Profile in- house folks to help support you through that process.

There’s also the Google Business Profile community help form where product experts like me jump in and we support people that are having trouble with verification issues as well. It is solvable. It just takes a different type of expertise that if you don’t have the time or the experience doing it, it might be a little frustrating. So reach out for support if you need help with getting those departments built in Google Business Profile and Verified. It’ll make a difference.

Joe Woll (49:19):

Dare I say it’ll take intentionality, which is-

Bambi Frazier (49:22):

Intentionality.

Joe Woll (49:22):

The core theme of today.

Bambi Frazier (49:24):

I want us all to think, fall asleep tonight with the word intentional floating above your head. That’s what I want.

Joe Woll (49:33):

That’s going to be a hard word to sleep. I’m counting sheep instead. But for Joel, we have another question. So what’s one misconception that you’re hearing most often when you talk to education and enrollment marketers about AI search?

Joel Espinoza (49:51):

I think clearly one of the misconceptions that I’m hearing is that paid marketing, any type of paid marketing can directly tie and correlate into AI visibility. And again, there’s many misconceptions, but that’s one of the main ones. And the second one is that there’s sort of a silver bullet for AI visibility. There is not.

There are many steps in taking the right steps to solving visibility, LLM visibility. We went through many here, there is not a single silver bullet that you can just get through and paid. Media does not contribute to your LLM visibility.

Joe Woll (50:38):

I’m smiling because that’s what we on the SEO side of the world have been saying about Google for years as well. The paid investment gets to the top of the results, doesn’t affect your organic rankings and there’s no silver bullet.

So critical thinking, intentionality, that’s what gets you there. Absolutely. And then for Bambi, you mentioned those Google reps to help and I’m smiling as I ask this question. How do you get in contact with Google reps for all your departmental listings?

Bambi Frazier (51:09):

You’re looking at her. I’m just kidding. So when it comes to your Google Business profile, first thing I want to tell you is when you log into the backend settings of Google Business Profile, on the top right, there’s going to be a little blue rectangle that says add business. Department for your effort is the same thing as a business. You’re going to click on that and that’s when you go through and you enter all the name, address, phone number, all the good stuff about the departments that you want to have listed.

The likelihood of it being automatically verified is slim to none. So once you get everything added in, you will have an option to go through the verification process, which is typically video. It was a shot in the dark a couple years ago. Google has since enhanced the video verification process where they hold your hand a little bit more.

If you’re having trouble with the verification process, you can reach out to Google support. On the left side, when you’re logged into Google Business Profile, you’ll see a few different menu items and one I believe will say support. Click that and you can reach out to support that way. If you get an auto reply, sometimes it’s a no reply, which I’m sure you have experienced. Then it’ll trigger what’s called a case ID and you save that case ID for your records.

When they do reply, even if it’s the auto reply that doesn’t answer your question, which can be very frustrating, make sure you copy, paste that case ID. Then you head on over to the Google Business Profile community help form where product experts like me more or less live in there and we help folks all over the world to resolve their Google business profile issues.

If we can’t help you solve it, then we have the ability to escalate it to the team at Google to say, “Hey, can you help this person?” Fun fact, a lot of people don’t know that when you do need to verify location, you can request live video verification where you get in a queue and you wait for a Google rep to join and they actually walk you through the process of what you need to show.

That can fast track verification as well. It can be very daunting. I’m not saying it lightly. I’m not saying, “Oh, just go verify, not a big deal.” It can be really hard to do and it’ll make you want to pull your hair out because you have a million other things to do besides deal with your Google business profile. But I’m glad you’re asking. That’s the process and I’m happy to chat online if you have any other questions.

That’s why we’re here. Offline, I mean, not online or online either way. Give me a call.

Joe Woll (53:26):

However, they can reach you. Right, exactly. It’s the Ghostbusters, but it’s for Google listing verification. That’s right. Awesome. Another question. Joel, this one’s for you. So this question’s about showing up in AI search for students who are much earlier in their journey.

So they’re not necessarily looking for research on specific programs or degrees. They’re just thinking about a better job or better prospects in life. How does a university contend with those types of prompts and responses?

Joel Espinoza (54:00):

Yeah, that’s a great question. There are many ways, but you have to think about how would somebody ask an LLM and four type of training. I get back into how students will ask Google certain things. I’ll give you a good example.

I’ve worked with lineman schools and linemen schools, they get on telephone poles and they go up telephone polls, but a student may say, “I want to work with telephone polls.” You’ve got to think critically of how somebody will think or speak into a LLM so that it’s being picked up. We mentioned that we want to be very, very specific and we want to be very, very deliberate, but you can be deliberately vague and talk about trade schools.

You can talk about trade programs, you can talk about specific programs that will be a catchall to them. Remember, half of the LLM is the answer part and the other half is generating additional information.

The generative part can be suggested if you have enough information on the answers section. So you want to write very specific information about your programs, about the outcomes and many other things because someone might not know what they’re looking for, but they’ll say, “What’s something that I can finish in eight months? What’s something that I can do in less than a year? What’s a program that I can finish at night?”

They’re all going to be tied back to your programs, but again, they may not know what they want yet, but if your program fits their response, it will start to suggest that. So think about somebody might say, “Hey, what’s the best program for a single mother? What’s the program for somebody that can only take classes online or on the weekends or early mornings?” Think about how somebody may search for those and then mold that into the strategy so that you have information to meet those needs.

Bambi, did you want to add anything to that?

Bambi Frazier (56:11):

I feel like you covered it beautifully. You knocked it out of the park. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Joe Woll (56:19):

Well, perfect. Well, we have one more question and this one’s for you anyway, Bambi, so we’re kicking it back to you and it’s about AI search and optimization, but now we’re talking about that proximity signal. So we got multiple programs spanning multiple campuses. How does that play into AI search surfacing the university and those programs?

Bambi Frazier (56:43):

This is a really good question. Think about it like this. For every place, for every campus that you have, that should be its own standalone Google business profile and then plugged into the website field of each one of those campuses and each department within that campus should be a structured location specific page that speaks to that campus and/or that department.

Each one of those pages, I don’t want to see just swapped out town or city name and address like, “Oh, well, we offer nursing here and we offer it there. Let’s just change that. “

No, you can’t do that because again, we said this earlier, if you don’t care that much to invest in making that page informative and make it crawlable and to make it a healthy, robust page with all kinds of good, rich, hyper local content information, if you don’t care to put that time and effort into it, why should the LLMs and why should the search engines care to rank you or recommend your school?

So I want all of those pages for each individual campus to be very specific to the location. Tell me what’s around the campus. Identify the different programs on the campus, the different facilities. Who are the different faculty on that campus? Tell me everything that I could possibly ask on that department page as it relates to that specific campus.

And remember, they are all perfectly eligible to have their own Google business profile because I want you to start treating your departments at your school like a storefront. If you think about it like that, that should start to shift your mindset.

Joe Woll (58:23):

And maybe simply just explaining why the program is on different campuses for those pages is there the anatomy lab is in New York, but the lecture halls are up in Westchester where there’s more space, right? That’s right. Maybe that’s part of the explanation. So that’s unique content that separates those two pages but helps with the discoverability of the program in both areas. Fantastic. Well, thank you guys. That was our last question.

If we didn’t get to your question or you have more after hearing us talk, take a snapshot of this QR code. It’ll lead you to a forum. You could submit any questions you have there or reach out to talk to us more about getting all your department listings verified with Bambi here or anything else you want to talk to us about. We appreciate your time and hope you enjoy the rest of the day.

Bambi Frazier (59:17):

Thanks everyone.

Joel Espinoza (59:18):

Thanks everyone.

Joe Woll (59:19):

Bye-bye.

Learn more about how AI search is transforming the role of reviews in higher education, or let’s talk about how Amsive Education can help you convert leads to enrollment.