In this 45-minute session, we explore how AI is transforming the way students find and choose universities – and what higher education digital teams need to do about it.
Video: Navigating the AI shift in Higher Education. Captions and transcript available on playback.
Explore how AI is transforming student search in higher education. Learn how content structure, accessibility, and clarity impact visibility, and discover practical steps to improve discoverability in AI-driven environments.
Dig deeper into practical frameworks, implementation checklists, and insights from digital leaders navigating the AI reckoning.
Not knowing where to start – 14%
Lack of tools to measure it – 17%
Getting buy-in from leadership – 17%
Capacity – we know what to do but don't have the time – 21%
Content is spread across too many teams to fix quickly – 31%
When you have a large content estate, knowing where to start is genuinely difficult – and trying to work through it manually isn't realistic at that scale.
The most practical approach is to use an auditing tool to crawl your site, surface issues, and prioritize fixes based on impact. That cuts out the multi-month review process you'd otherwise need just to understand where the gaps are. Squiz Content Intelligence is built for this use case – it does the initial audit and brings back prioritized recommendations so you're not starting from a blank spreadsheet.
You still need to apply your own judgment to make sure the recommendations align with your goals. Admissions pages, program listings, tuition and financial aid information – these are typically where prospective students are asking the questions that matter most, so it's worth making sure the priorities reflect your enrollment objectives. But the tool does the heavy lifting of getting you from "where do we even start" to "here's what to fix first."
Less than you might expect – and it doesn't have to happen all at once.
Rather than treating this as a large upfront project, the goal is to build content improvement into your regular workflow by starting with a focused section of your site, making progress there, then moving to the next. It's manageable, incremental work rather than a major resource commitment.
Having the right auditing tool makes a significant difference. If you're working in-house with a small team, the old approach – manual scanning, spreadsheets, working through issues one by one – doesn't scale. Squiz Content Intelligence does the heavy lifting of identifying issues and prioritizing what to fix first, so your team's time is spent on the work that actually moves the needle rather than manually assessing hundreds of pages.
A good starting point is simply testing it yourself – ask the questions your prospective students are likely asking on AI search platforms (e.g. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode), and see whether your institution is mentioned or your content is being cited in the answers.
For a more structured view, Squiz Content Intelligence has an AI Readiness Auditor that gives you a readiness assessment of each topic on your site, generating relevant questions based on the topics and testing how well AI can use your content to answer them. That gives you a baseline you can track over time, so improvement becomes measurable.
From there, traffic quality can be a useful signal. For example, you may start to see higher-intent visitors – people who arrive with clearer intent and move more quickly to key actions like enquiries or applications. That can indicate they’re getting better answers earlier in their journey.
If you're running on-site conversational search, that's also worth tracking. As your content improves, students asking natural language questions should get more accurate, useful responses – giving you a direct feedback loop you can observe without relying entirely on third-party platforms.
That’s right. Squiz Content Intelligence audits your existing content rather than generating net-new content for you. It checks against AI readiness, accessibility standards, and content quality signals, then gives you a prioritized list of what to fix and why. It also provides clear, actionable recommendations – so your team knows exactly what needs attention and how to approach it.
The actual creation and rewriting still sits with your team, but the guidance gives you a much stronger starting point. Instead of figuring out what’s wrong and where to begin, you can focus your time on making targeted improvements.
Strong SEO is a genuine head start. The principles that underpin good SEO – clear, well-structured content, logical page hierarchy, relevance to what people are searching for – are the same foundations AI search visibility builds on.
Squiz Content Intelligence helps you take that further, going beyond performance in traditional search engines (e.g. Google, Bing) to improving how your content is discovered in AI search platforms (e.g. ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity). It helps you ensure your content is complete, consistent, and explicitly answers the questions your audience is likely to ask – and tells you exactly what to fix. For teams with strong SEO already in place, it's the next layer of the work.
If you're already across the auditing layer, where Squiz Content Intelligence adds value for someone in your role is in how it helps you measure and prioritize on an ongoing basis. Beyond the initial audit, it tracks how your content's AI readiness improves over time as you make changes, and continuously surfaces which pages and topics still need attention – so you're not just fixing a backlog once, but directing your writing strategy on an ongoing basis.
And when that content is in good shape, it also becomes the foundation for on-site conversational search – so the work you're doing has an impact beyond AI search platforms, directly improving how students find answers on your own site too.
Pricing is tiered based on the number of pages you want to audit and how frequently your content changes. For a site with 10,000+ pages, the final cost will depend on the scope of coverage and the update cadence you need.
If useful, request a free AI visibility report to get a baseline of your current position: https://insights.squiz.net/content-intelligence#get-started. A member of the team can then walk you through the results and discuss pricing to suit your requirements.
Squiz Content Intelligence isn't included in your Squiz DXP subscription by default, but can be added to your subscription at an additional cost. Your account manager can walk you through what that looks like for your setup.
