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00:00:01
The AI Signals
13 Plays11 days ago
In this episode, Rustam Irani explores how AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are fundamentally changing how prospective students research colleges and programs. He breaks down why traditional website traffic may be declining while enrollment quality improves, and explains the four critical metrics institutions must track to understand their visibility in AI-generated search results. Rustam also shares the foundational SEO and authority-building principles that still matter in the age of LLMs, along with practical insight into how schools can improve their presence, sentiment, and share of voice in AI-driven discovery experiences.
Resources Mentioned
- RGI AEO Dashboard - https://aeo.rgiconsulting.net/leadsquared/
Timestamps
- 00:00 – 01:23 — How prospective students are using AI tools to research colleges and programs before ever visiting a school website
- 01:24 – 03:05 — The four core metrics schools must track in AI search: visibility, share of voice, citation rate, and sentiment
- 03:06 – 05:32 — Why some schools are seeing lower inquiry volume but higher application and enrollment quality
- 05:33 – 06:50 — The SEO and authority fundamentals that still matter in the LLM era
- 06:51 – 08:14 — The new kinds of nuanced student questions appearing inside AI search tools
- 08:15 – 10:22 — How AI visibility dashboards and citation analysis help schools identify content opportunities
- 10:23 – 11:56 — The importance of reputation, transparency, partnerships, and consistent messaging in AI-generated results
- 11:57 – 15:12 — Why schools don’t need massive budgets to compete in AI search—and what they actually need instead
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Transcript
The Rise of LLMs in University Program Searches
00:00:01
Rustam Irani
prospective student asks GPT, chat GPT, perplexity, Claude, any of these LLMs, which universities have the strongest medical assisting programs, cybersecurity programs, which are the best programs in my city?
00:00:23
Rustam Irani
These are the questions that are being asked more and more day in and day out. And interestingly, these are the ones that are actually coming up in the search results and students are finding out information prior to coming to the site of a school or a brand prior to engaging.
Institutional Awareness of Search Visibility
00:00:44
Rustam Irani
They're getting these results within seconds. And here's the scary part. A lot of institutions don't even understand when they're showing up, how they're showing up.
00:00:56
Rustam Irani
where they're appearing or not. so that's really a huge opportunity to take the time to kind of understand where you're showing up, how you're showing up.
00:01:08
Rustam Irani
And that's why we have built a couple tools for this. And I'll talk a little bit about that. But more than anything, want to dig into what are those key components that allow your school to show up?
00:01:22
Rustam Irani
Welcome back to ROI University, podcast for higher ed marketers and leaders who wanna change the game and themselves, of course. I'm Roussameerani, your host, recovering engineer and former higher ed CMO, and now CEO and founder of RGI.
Understanding AI-Generated Search Results
00:01:41
Rustam Irani
Behind every AI generated answer, there's things going on in the background. And what I wanted to do today was to talk a little bit about what we're seeing as those things that are happening in the background, how the AI search engines are digging into the results and deciding whether or not your school shows up or your company shows up.
00:02:09
Rustam Irani
So Really what we've boiled it down into in what we've built out, which is a dashboard or a platform is four core areas.
Core Factors Affecting School Visibility
00:02:20
Rustam Irani
One, visibility. Are you showing up? Do you even show up? Two, share a voice. How much are you showing up if you do show up?
00:02:32
Rustam Irani
Citation rate, which is basically how often are you showing up? And then where in those rankings and the sentiment.
00:02:43
Rustam Irani
Basically, what is being said about you? Is it positive? Is it bad? Is it negative or is it neutral? And those are really the core components that can allow you to get a better picture on what's going on, where you're showing up, where you're not, what's happening.
Impact of LLMs on Student Inquiries and Applications
00:03:02
Rustam Irani
now if you're like a lot of schools out there right now they're are definite slowdowns with or at least decreases that we're seeing on site traffic to a lot of school websites.
00:03:20
Rustam Irani
Part of this is, at least from our experience and our research in dozens of schools, working with dozens of schools, we've seen that The reality is a lot of students are finding out information that they would have gone to a school site in these LLMs.
00:03:39
Rustam Irani
And so when that's the case, you have to understand how they're getting that information and really what that means. Interestingly, one of our clients, a pretty large national institution, recently over the last, I would say probably six months to a year, we've definitely seen bit of a decline on traffic to the site and even inquiries that have filled out an RFI or a request for information form on the website.
00:04:13
Rustam Irani
Interestingly, the lower inquiry rate is actually creating higher application numbers as well as higher enrollment numbers.
00:04:25
Rustam Irani
So that got us to kind of pause and think, like, does this mean that the students that are coming have received the information they wanted potentially out of the site, come to the site,
00:04:39
Rustam Irani
inquired and have a bit more intent when they're actually filling out an application and enrolling. So if that is the case, then how can we as institutions be in front of these questions at the right moments when these questions are being answered or asked? I'm
The Enduring Importance of SEO
00:05:01
Rustam Irani
sorry. so basically, know, a lot of what's out there right now, and you're going to hear this with GEO, AEO, all of these different things to kind of tell you how to get out there. The reality is, you know, boils down to still the fundamental SEO, uh, you know,
00:05:22
Rustam Irani
principles, right? The EAT principles of having expertise, authority, trust, and all of that. But a couple other components, right?
00:05:34
Rustam Irani
Entity authority is important. You've got to have that authority in your marketplace, in whatever kind of program set or, you know, degree level, or even it could be local. structured content, your content still has to be structured in a way that Google recognizes it, and even these LLMs.
00:05:55
Rustam Irani
Although these LLMs are looking for a little different spin on that, more conversational than keyword-based, like we typically would have done in the past with SEO, which still is very important. Third party mentions, are you showing up in some of the other mentions that are out there? Contextual relevance, is the content relevant to the course of study, the program, the job placement opportunities and so on. And then at the end of the day, like what's the depth of the content, the topical depth of the content? Those are still very, very important factors to look out for.
AI Tools in Student Research and School Visibility
00:06:36
Rustam Irani
And when you look at some of the external factors, again, like mentioned, prospective students are using tools more than ever in their research. And we've seen this. And the tool that we use, the dashboard, is actually showing percentage of where these students are looking for these search terms, what they're searching for, and how these schools are showing up.
00:07:04
Rustam Irani
Really, you know, students aren't looking to pull up 15 different website tabs with different schools and programs and look at it that way. They're literally typing into LLM and saying, hey, here are the three schools I'm interested in.
00:07:24
Rustam Irani
Can you give me highlights on all three? And based on what you know about me, which is the best option for me? Those are literally searches that we're seeing that are popping up and coming which is really powerful when you think about it. So those are the types of things, nuanced types questions that are coming up in these searches that students are asking that our schools and institutions should be considering. And there are ways to show up in that.
00:07:55
Rustam Irani
Basically, at least the tool that we've built out takes a look at where the citations are, where we're showing up, where our clients are showing up, where some of the schools are showing up, and then actually lists out relevant content snippets of why certain schools are showing up and why we're not. And then you can start to build whether it's content,
00:08:21
Rustam Irani
blogs, articles, maybe resources, so you can start to show up for those questions. And you can definitely see, we are seeing that there are subset of questions that are coming up more frequently than not.
00:08:37
Rustam Irani
it is extremely important and going to continue to be more and more important to show up in those, which is really what kind of the tool does is it looks at all of those things and shows us where we're showing up, where we're not showing up, what we need to do to show up. And again, what I mentioned is really there's the four core components to that, right? The visibility,
Assessing and Improving Search Performance
00:09:02
Rustam Irani
are you showing up?
00:09:04
Rustam Irani
The share of voice, how much are you showing up if you are showing up? The citation rate, which is how often and where are you showing up? Typically, you'll see when you do a results search and you get the LLM results, you'll see that list, right?
00:09:22
Rustam Irani
Where are you showing up? And our tool actually shows all of that of where you're showing up in that list. And then the other important thing is like, what's being said about you is it positive is it is it not is it neutral is there really no really no input input there uh or or feedback the the other thing that's important in this when you think about you know the internal factors for students or for prospective students
00:09:52
Rustam Irani
you know, are you sharing real outcome data? Are you looking at third party validation, whether it's the corporate climate, whether it's partnerships, those sort of things? Is the messaging transparent?
00:10:10
Rustam Irani
the alums are picking these things up. It's pretty amazing to start to see how it's determining some of these things and how it's picking up your consistency and your expertise statements, right? Your reputation, again, that's kind of where we built out that part that tells you from the reputation side. So all of these are really important core components. And then, you know, as marketers, we want make sure we are staying on top of
00:10:42
Rustam Irani
what is being said about our brands, what is being said about us as a brand. And then we want to make sure that story, we want to make sure the messaging, we want to make sure what our prospective students are seeing is consistent and relevant and also really on point with our brand.
00:11:08
Rustam Irani
And we can do that. And there's a way to do that. Again, it's just a matter of understanding what is currently being said, how it's being said, where we're showing up and what can we do to kind of get in there.
Audit Services for Sentiment and Visibility Analysis
00:11:21
Rustam Irani
So,
00:11:24
Rustam Irani
What we have done, will share link to this, and if anybody's interested, we do have a way to do an audit where we can run a sentiment analysis or an AEO full analysis. We've done this for kind conferences that we've been but if you're interested,
00:11:42
Rustam Irani
I'll basically send me an email, send me a note, and we'll get that over to you. There's a couple things we need in order to do that, but it's really a pretty cool tool. It actually, again, what I was mentioning was if you look at...
00:11:59
Rustam Irani
It basically would tell you all the core search terms that are happening, where they're happening, whether clodge, HTTP perplexity, um if you're mentioned, your share of voice, what's your how many like if there are 10 results, how many times are you showing up, right? Three out of 10. What's the sentiment? Is it good, neutral, or bad?
00:12:21
Rustam Irani
are your competitors showing up and then actually you'll be able to click on a link that'll even show you what's showing up, how it's showing up and what we can do to show up on our side. So again,
00:12:36
Rustam Irani
The LLMs are definitely impacting
Debating the Sufficiency of SEO in the Age of LLMs
00:12:40
Rustam Irani
search. If somebody is telling you that it's just SEO and the LLMs don't have anything to do with people searching and they're not really a factor,
00:12:53
Rustam Irani
I believe that's false. We are seeing that in the data. a lot of other people are seeing that in the data. It's just another way students are finding out information about us, our schools.
00:13:06
Rustam Irani
and about you. So, you know, really the schools are going to win this AI search battle. You don't necessarily have to have the biggest budgets. You don't necessarily have to have tons of content.
00:13:20
Rustam Irani
You just have to be able to understand where you are showing up. how you're showing up, how often you're showing up and have a bit of a game plan. And the great thing is you're already great at what you do.
00:13:33
Rustam Irani
You're already differentiated in what you do. You should be able to just have a consistent plan to push that out, which will be extremely impactful. So if you're interested, reach out. I also put a link to it in the show notes, but Keep putting effort out there, keep doing all the fundamentals as far as what differentiates you as a school, as a brand, why you're unique.
00:14:05
Rustam Irani
All of the other things that I mentioned about transparency, about proof, about all of those things, partnerships are just so key. And if you can get a little bit better handle, if you don't have a handle on how you're showing up in the LLMs and how to get a bit more exposure, you're going to want to chip away at that.
00:14:26
Rustam Irani
Well, that's all for this episode and class of ROI University, where the biggest ROI personal.