[00:00:00] Cheryl Broom: Hi, I'm Cheryl Broom, CEO of GradComm and host of Higher Ed Conversations, and I'm here with this month's Quick Take. Over the past several months, GradComm has conducted 22 AI visibility and reputation audits for colleges. And through this, we have learned a lot. In fact, when I first started putting this episode together, I planned to cover all 10 of our biggest findings all at once.
[00:00:26] Cheryl Broom: But once I started writing, I realized there was simply too much good information to cram into one podcast without rushing through it. So I'm splitting this into two parts. This month, I'm gonna walk through the first five things we learned from these audits, and then next month, come back, listen again to the podcast because I will conclude with the final five.
[00:00:48] Cheryl Broom: Before I get into what we learned I want to send you back in time a little bit. Earlier this year, I recorded podcast episode 71 titled ÒWhat Would ChatGPT Say About Your College?Ó And at the time, I was raising a question I thought every college should be asking. Now, after conducting all of these audits, we have a much clearer picture of the answer.
[00:01:12] Cheryl Broom: When we started this work, we were obviously interested in AI. Are colleges showing up in ChatGPT? What does Google AI mode and search say about them? What happens when a prospective student asks an AI tool to recommend a college? And what we found is that the bigger story is actually reputation. AI is pulling together information from across the internet and trying to make sense of your college.
[00:01:41] Cheryl Broom: Your website matters, but so do your partners, directories, news coverage, social media, public profiles, reviews, and all of the other places where people talk about you. So today, let's start with the first five things we learned, and let's see, what you can learn from this. Okay, number one, being recognized does not mean you will be recommended.
[00:02:09] Cheryl Broom: So this has probably been the biggest finding from our audits. If I ask an AI tool about a college by name, it can usually tell me quite a bit. It knows where the college is. It can often identify programs and describe the institution reasonably well. But prospective students don't always start with a college name.
[00:02:30] Cheryl Broom: They ask, "Where can I get affordable healthcare training near me?" Or they might ask, "What college is good for a working parent?" Or, "Where can I take evening classes and transfer to a university?" That changes the game because now AI has to decide which colleges belong in the answer. And we have seen colleges that offer exactly what the student is requesting that don't get recommended and aren't included in the AI search results. So that tells me that colleges need to think beyond, "Can AI find us?" The more important question is, "What does AI know about us?"
[00:03:11] Cheryl Broom: Okay, number two, specificity wins. Community colleges have wonderful stories to tell, but many colleges tell very similar stories. They are affordable, they care about students, they offer career education, they have transfer programs, and all of those things are true and important, but they don't necessarily distinguish one college from another.
[00:03:39] Cheryl Broom: What stands out in our audits are the specifics, a unique nursing program, a certificate you can complete in eight months, a direct transfer agreement with the university, an advanced manufacturing lab built with local employers, a program that leads to a very specific career. Those are things AI can connect to a college.
[00:04:04] Cheryl Broom: Career focused education is a broad promise, but getting a result that tells you this nine-month program prepares you for this occupation, includes hands-on training, and connects you with these employers, gives both the student and AI something meaningful to work with. 
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[00:04:55] Cheryl Broom: Number three, colleges usually have the information students need.
[00:05:00] Cheryl Broom: They've just made students work really hard to find it. So this is something that came up constantly throughout all these 22 AI audits. The answer to a student's question is usually somewhere on the website. The cost is on one page, the prerequisite is in the catalog, the schedule is somewhere else, career information is on the department page, the application instructions are another three clicks away, and something important is living on a PDF.
[00:05:28] Cheryl Broom: And if you work in higher ed, you might not, you might know how to navigate all of that, while a prospective student probably doesn't. And AI, for as amazing it is, may not put all those pieces together correctly either. One of the best questions colleges can ask about an academic program page is simple.
[00:05:50] Cheryl Broom: Could a prospective student look at this page and understand what they will earn, how long it will take, approximately what it will cost, when classes are offered, what career it can lead to, and what a student should do next? If the answer is no, then you've got some work to do. And you need to create your website pages in a way that if students find them organically, those questions are answered, and then as a bonus, that makes those answers more reliable in AI.
[00:06:22] Cheryl Broom: This also connects to something we've talked before about GradComm in terms of secret shopping. When information is technically available but difficult to find, we see it as a student experience problem, and AI can make those gaps even easier to see. Number four, SEO still matters a lot. There is so much conversation right now about GEO, AEO, AI optimization and whatever acronym will probably be invented next week.
[00:06:54] Cheryl Broom: And I don't want colleges to get distracted by that. A strong technical and content foundation still matters. Your website needs good structure. Your pages need useful titles and metadata. Programs need clear content. Internal links need to make sense. Your site has to work well on mobile and important information needs to be current.
[00:07:18] Cheryl Broom: And of course, schema can help machines understand what they're looking at. Good SEO makes your information easier for search engines to understand and much of that same work makes your information easier for AI systems to understand. We recently published a blog on the GradComm website called Why AI Visibility Starts with Strong SEO.
[00:07:42] Cheryl Broom: And if you're responsible for your college website, I recommend checking it out because we go much deeper there into the technical and content pieces that support AI visibility. Now that's really easy to find, just go to gradcomm.com and you'll see the article in our blog page. So don't abandon SEO for some shiny new AI strategy.
[00:08:02] Cheryl Broom: I would make sure that your SEO foundation is strong first. And our fifth and final lesson for this month's podcast, number five, college programs need pathways, not lists.
[00:08:19] Cheryl Broom: So most colleges do a pretty good job telling people what they offer, an associate degree in this program, a certificate in that program, but we're seeing gaps in explaining what happens after the degree or certificate. So you can imagine students are going to AI and they're asking questions like, "What credential will I actually learn?
[00:08:37] Cheryl Broom: How long will it take? Is there a shorter certificate I can earn along the way? What job does this prepare me for? Can I transfer? What is the next credential after this one?" A list tells students what you have, but a pathway helps them picture a future. And that's much more important, whether a student is reading the page directly or asking an AI tool to compare options.
[00:09:03] Cheryl Broom: So you can tell a pathway story through the narrative on your website, but you can also tell it through a testimonial, a short video, content on other pages and news articles, other areas that AI is pulling from. So you want to be able to answer a student's question when they ask, "Well, so what? I'm gonna earn an associate degree.
Well, so what? What does that mean?" So think about painting that entire pathway for a student. So these are the first five things we've learned and a clear theme runs through all of them, believe it or not. It's, it's a theme that I think I've talked about almost every single podcast. Colleges need to make it easier for students and also for AI to understand who they are, what they offer, and why those offerings matter.
[00:09:57] Cheryl Broom: That means being specific about programs, organizing information around the questions students are actually asking, strengthening your SEO foundation, and helping students see a clear pathway from interest to outcome. The biggest takeaway for me is that visibility alone is not enough. A college can be easy to find and still be hard to understand.
[00:10:25] Cheryl Broom: And if AI cannot clearly connect your strengths to a student's needs, you may never make it into the recommendation. So next month I'll cover the other five findings and that's where we're gonna move really deep into reputation. And I'm gonna talk about affordability, working adults, third party sources, inconsistent information, and the role social and video content can play in shaping the story AI tells about your institution.
[00:10:57] Cheryl Broom: Those findings make one thing very clear. Your AI reputation is being built in a lot more places than just your website. So I'll be back next month with the second half of what we've learned. In the meantime, if you're curious about what AI is saying about your college, where your reputation is strong and where there may be gaps, that is exactly what our AI visibility and reputation audit is designed to uncover.
[00:11:24] Cheryl Broom: And we'd love to do one for your college. So if you're interested, just reach out to me at cheryl@gradcomm.com or hit me up on LinkedIn. Until next time.