AI is changing how students search: What it means for marketing and recruitment

The following is a guest post contributed by Guus Goorts, a Netherlands-based education marketing coach who helps universities and schools improve student recruitment through audits, training and coaching. Find him at guusgoorts.com.

Prospective students are increasingly using ChatGPT and other AI models to help them make decisions – including to which schools to apply. A recent survey by INTO University Partnerships found that that 17% of recently admitted students reported to have used AI tools for researching study options.

Another stat: Cues.ai, based on web analytics data from around 20 UK universities, saw web visits referred by ChatGPT rise nine-fold during 2025.

And all of this proof is likely understating how prospective students make decisions right now, for several reasons: People mostly read answers within the tool, and even when they click through to your website, it is notoriously hard to track. And even a traditional search in Google can bring up an AI overview as an answer.

What does AI search mean for education marketing?

Your first instinct may be to make drastic changes, but although there are definitely changes to make, my advice is to take it slow.

While AI search changes how prospective students get information, it doesn’t change the fundamentals of good marketing. You still need to get the right messages to the audience that matters to you and make sure they get the right information at an appropriate time in their decision making process.

All of the below influences how you show up in AI platforms. You’re likely already doing most of them:

• Your website is the only place on the web that is fully controlled by you. Making sure your website provides accurate information and is easy to nagivate helps prospective students directly and “feeds” the AI models at the same time.
• Ranking and comparison websites are especially important when prospective students ask questions around rankings, which they often do.
• Digital word of mouth – what your current students and alumni are saying about your institution across the web. This provides a more ‘impartial’ perspective from students’ point of view, and there are ways you can encourage this, such as working with student ambassadors as content creators.

A more important reason for not making abrupt changes: the “old” channels still work! Prospective students will continue to consult a mix of different sources, both offline and online. They will still visit student fairs and some will prefer to enlist an agent’s help. They’re still on TikTok and instagram. It’s just that AI answers are becoming an increasingly important part of the mix.

So if you’re running a digital campaign that works, keep going and make gradual changes as the need arises. And as I argue in my book Genuinely Helpful, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) best practices that help your website show up in Google are by and large the same practices that make your institution visible on AI platforms.

What will change

That is not to say that the shift to AI search is business as usual. In the 18 years that I’ve been active in online education marketing, I have seen lots of change, but this is the quickest and most significant shift I’ve seen so far.

Here is what will change:

Tracking and KPIs. Fewer people will visit your website. And tracking those who do will get harder. This means that you will need to get comfortable doing marketing with less data on what works. And at the same time, you need to start paying attention to AI visibility.

Tracking AI visibility is tough: the only way to see inside the black box is to ask each tool the same question repeatedly and see whether your school is mentioned and with what sentiment. There are tools which will automate this process and provide aggregated statistics that you can drill down on. I personally use peec.ai.

Before you start tracking, spend some time investigating which questions prospective students are likely to ask. You can find clues by checking popular search keywords, mining student enquiries and analysing forum discussions.

Accuracy. Another aspect to pay attention to: the content of AI answers. Do they represent your institution accurately? For example, you may have offered a scholarship that has since then been discontinued. If it is still mentioned on an abandoned page on your website, AI may pick up on it.

AI tracking tools will cite the sources that informed particular answers, so if you check the answers on a regular basis, it’s often easy to find the culprit. Once you know incorrect information is out there, you can move to correct it.

Influencing AI mentions. Once you start tracking your visibility, you’ll notice that you’re not always part of the answers you’d love to be mentioned in. Influence your visibility by publishing helpful content around the question’s topic on your website and elsewhere. Since AI tools like to draw on a variety of sources, this content should come in different shapes and forms: a blog post on your website, a helpful YouTube video, a student ambassador participating in Reddit conversations. Sounds a lot like common sense good marketing, doesn’t it?

In short

Prospective students are increasingly using AI tools to compare and evaluate their study options. While there’s no need for abrupt changes to what you’re doing (keep doing what works!), this change will impact online marketing success measures. So expect fewer website visits and conversions as more people get their answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity or inside Google AI Overviews.

Now is the time to start paying attention to whether your school is mentioned in AI tools at all, and what they say about you.

For additional background, please see:

• “The ChatGPT Generation: How AI Is quietly rewriting the global student search experience”
• “Growing use of AI for study abroad decisions highlights importance of multi-channel marketing strategies”
• “Students are switching to AI for search. Are you ready?”