The Pulse of Higher Ed

By Bruce Etter

Imagine your bellwether program stepping into a modern search arena with a glossy tri-fold and a storied reputation, ready to battle any challenger. Across the ring rolls a robotic rival as “The Imperial March” blares over the speakers. The ref signals start; a blinding spotlight from the robot makes your program vanish from view. The quality of your offering isn’t in doubt, if anything it’s better than the competitor, but the scoreboard still reads 100–0 in the blink of an eye. That’s 2025 search. UPCEA’s latest study with Search Influence, titled AI Search in Higher Education: How Prospects Search in 2025, maps the new ground rules: when AI-SEO can read, trust, and cite clear, authoritative, well-structured program pages, you get seen; when it can’t, you don’t.

Search engines still sit at the top of the research stack. Page one remains the front door, and most prospects will only knock if you’re there. Eighty-two percent of prospective and current professional and continuing education students say a page-one result makes them more likely to consider a program. That’s not vanity ranking; it’s the gate to the consideration set. AI overviews now act like a spotlight on that doorstep. Seventy-nine percent read them when they appear, and 56 percent report higher trust when your site is cited. If you’re named, you earn credibility before the visit; if you’re not, you’re invisible to a large share of qualified demand.

That dynamic explains the channel hierarchy. Prospects start with search, then turn to institutional sites to confirm details. Eighty-four percent are extremely or very likely to use search engines to research programs, and 63 percent say the same for university sites. Seventy-seven percent rate those sites as extremely or very trustworthy, ahead of search engines and well above social. Your program pages are the trust anchor for both humans and machines. The words, structure, and references on those pages now do double duty: they persuade people and signal authority to AI.

Visibility depends on how well your pages feed the spotlight. SEO is the lighting rig – it makes content legible to Google, gives AI summaries citable answers, and guides prospects to a clear, scannable program page. When the rig is weak, AI has nothing trustworthy to cite and your presence fades. When it’s strong, built on structured entities, clean internal links, and authoritative references, both Google and AI surface you consistently. The practical target is precision over puffery. Answer what you teach, who it’s for, time to completion, cost, and expected outcomes with specific, verifiable detail.

The operational shift is simple and measurable. Write program pages for citation as well as conversion. If a line would stand on its own in an AI summary, put it on the page. Use plain-English questions and definitions, spell out comparisons and prerequisites, and publish those answers directly on your program pages in structured, machine-readable HTML. Add the scaffolding machines use to validate and connect facts with appropriate schema, tight internal linking, and reputable external references. These moves make the page more useful to humans and more legible to AI – the combination that wins visibility.

Video follows the same pattern. Many prospects use YouTube like a search engine, so short explainers that mirror your top question clusters are no longer optional. Produce concise videos that answer the core questions, with accurate titles and descriptions, time-stamped chapters, and links back to the canonical program page. This keeps the journey coherent: search or AI surfaces your institution, video builds clarity and confidence, and the program page closes the loop with complete, verifiable detail. The content does not need flash – it needs clarity and a direct path to the page AI will cite.

Quality signals matter more than volume. Authoritative pages show depth without bloat, concrete learning outcomes, relevant employer or industry ties, transparent tuition and fees, and sample schedules that make time-to-completion obvious. When you state an outcome, make it checkable. When you use a term of art, define it. When you reference labor-market alignment, link to evidence. Each element lifts human trust and gives AI reasons to surface your page. Treating these details as internal knowledge or burying them in attachments is a visibility tax. Put the details on the page.

This approach also avoids the false tradeoff between branded and non-branded queries. Prospects often begin broad and comparative, looking for best options, local availability, requirements, costs, modality, and timelines, before they consider a brand. If your site only answers branded questions, AI has little to cite for the broad ones, and a competitor’s structured, citable answers will stand in for you. The goal isn’t to chase every keyword variant. The goal is to cover the core question families with authoritative, machine-readable answers that withstand human scrutiny.

Execution requires instrumentation. Track which question families you cover and how those pages perform across search, AI summaries where observable, and video. Watch impressions and click-through, inclusion and citation patterns, and follow-through from video to page. If a page earns impressions but not visits, tighten the snippet and opening paragraph. If a page earns AI citations for a question family, add adjacent content that answers the next two questions a prospect will ask. Make small, continuous moves that compound.

The payoff is practical. Visibility at page one opens the door. Being named in the AI overview confers trust at the moment a prospect decides where to click. A clear, authoritative program page confirms the decision and reduces friction to inquiry. None of this requires a gamble on novelty. Instead, it requires discipline about clarity, structure, and evidence. Treat inclusion in AI summaries as an SEO outcome you can engineer, not a black box. AI tools surface authoritative content – without SEO you don’t show up in AI, and without AI you don’t get the enrollment.

Bruce Etter serves as the Senior Director of Research and Consulting at UPCEA, where he leads the development and management of research initiatives for UPCEA’s Research and Consulting division and its clients.