For universities and education
Be the program AI names when a student asks.
“We have no idea what ChatGPT tells an applicant about our MBA, and it differs by country.”
Prospective students and their parents now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI which program to choose. The answer names three or four institutions, built from Niche, U.S. News, Reddit, and whatever your program pages say plainly. We track that answer per program and market, and by who is asking, then audit your templates and hand your web, content, and admissions teams a roadmap they can execute.
The problem
The answer names three schools. Yours is not one of them.
Five ways an institution loses applicants to AI answers while every team hits its targets.
The engine quotes Niche and a Reddit thread, and they pick someone else
Someone asks ChatGPT for the best online MBA for working professionals in Texas and gets three names. The engine built the answer from a Niche ranking, a U.S. News list, and a thread on r/MBA. Your program has better outcomes than two of the three, and not one of those pages quotes it.
Forty thousand pages, and none says cost, format, and duration together
Tuition lives on the bursar’s site, the format on the department’s, the duration in a PDF brochure, and the outcomes in a press release. An engine looking for one plain answer about your program finds four fragments and quotes a third party that assembled them first.
Central IT blocked the AI crawlers, and nobody in marketing knows
A robots.txt rule added to slow down scrapers keeps GPTBot and PerplexityBot out of every program page. The brochure is a PDF and the course catalog is drawn in by script, so the engines answer questions about your programs from what other sites say.
The answer differs by country, and you read none of them
An applicant in São Paulo gets a different shortlist than one in London, and a parent asking gets a third. International recruitment spends on fairs and agents. The engine every applicant asks first names your competitors instead, market by market, and no report shows it.
Brand, admissions, web, and each school own a slice, and nobody owns the answer
Brand owns the message, admissions owns the funnel, web owns the CMS, and the business school owns its own site. The AI answer cuts across all four and reports to none of them, so when Gemini calls your flagship program “expensive for the outcomes”, the finding has no owner.
Why now
Applicants already ask AI first. Other people’s research shows it.
Third-party figures, linked to their sources.
46%
of high school students use AI tools such as ChatGPT in their college search
Up from 26% in spring 2025. Nearly one in five removed a college from consideration because of what an AI answer said. 5,000+ students, October to November 2025.
79%
of prospective adult learners read Google’s AI Overviews when researching programs
56% are more likely to trust an institution cited in one. 760 adults aged 18 to 60 considering further education.
10.5%
of the time an institution’s own domain is cited when AI answers a question about it
Against a 35% mention rate. 51 US institutions, 20 queries each, seven AI providers. The sources cited most were Niche, Wikipedia, CollegeVine, U.S. News, and Reddit.
First, the templates
We audit your site by template, because nobody can audit forty thousand pages.
A university site is a program page template, a department template, a course catalog, a news template, and a few hundred PDFs, repeated thousands of times. The free audit runs 21 checks on one URL of each: whether the 20 AI crawlers we track are allowed in, whether the text is in the page or drawn in by script, whether the program page says cost, format, duration, and outcomes anywhere an engine can quote.
Every fail on a template is a fail on every page built from it, and one fix reaches them all the same way. The roadmap names the template, the check, and the team that owns it. The tracking shows what moved once your web team shipped it.
- Crawler access for 20 AI bots, checked per host and subdomain
- One program page, one department page, one brochure, one catalog entry, each scored
- Sitemap, canonicals, structured data, and llms.txt, checked once for the whole site
Then, the questions
We track the program-level questions, per market and per person asking.
Nobody asks an AI for “university”. They ask for the best online MBA for a working professional, an affordable nursing degree in Texas, whether a bootcamp beats a degree for data science, or whether a school is worth the money. We build that question set per program, then tag each question with who is asking: a prospective undergraduate, a working professional, a parent, or an international applicant.
Every day the platform puts those questions to every major AI engine in each country you recruit from, and records the full answer, which institutions it named and how early, and which sources it cited. Reports split by persona and by country, so the international office reads the Brazilian answer and the business school reads its own.
- Mention rate and share of voice per program, against the institutions the engines name instead
- Split by persona and by country: the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Greece today
The sources
We show you which sources the engines trust for your programs, and where you stand in them.
For each tracked question the platform lists every page the engines cited, by domain, with who owns it: you, a competitor, or a third party. In education that table is Niche, U.S. News, Reddit, Wikipedia, Coursera, and College Confidential, and then, well below them, a program page or two.
That is the map your teams need. Comms learns which rankings and threads shape the answer for each program; web sees which of your own pages get cited and which never do. A department that keeps losing a comparison sees the competitor page the engines quote for it, and what that page says that yours does not.
- Cited pages and domains per question, engine, and country, with You, competitor, or third-party ownership
- The Reddit and YouTube pages the engines cite for your programs, ranked
Every month, the briefing
A briefing on what moved, with an owner for every item.
Each month we read the window against the one before it, per program and market: which institutions gained share, which sources the engines started or stopped citing, which questions are new, and which engines moved. A strategist turns that into the briefing and walks your teams through it.
Every signal ends in a task with an owner. Web unblocks the crawlers on the catalog subdomain, and the business school rewrites its program page to state tuition, format, and duration in one place. Comms works the ranking that now shapes the UK answer. Admissions gets a line on which programs the engines describe well and which they get wrong.
Who is asking
Four people ask about the same program, and get four answers
Each persona is a tag on a tracked question, so every report can be split by who was asking.
Prospective undergraduate
Wants to know which schools are strong for a major, what campus life is like, and whether they can get in. The answer leans on Niche, Reddit, and the rankings.
Working professional
Asks about online and part-time formats, how long it takes, what it costs, and whether the credential pays off. The engines quote the program pages that state all four plainly.
Parent
Cares about cost, safety, outcomes, and value for money. The answer a parent gets is more cautious: it cites more news and names fewer institutions.
International applicant
Asks from their own country, often in their own language, about visas, English requirements, and scholarships. The shortlist changes with the market.
The engagement
How universities and education providers work with ELEVA
You have web, content, comms, and admissions teams. We bring the audit, the tracking, the briefings, and the roadmap they execute.
For universities and education providers
GEO Consulting & Trends
We quote it per engagement, as a retainer or a project, after a free audit of the templates and programs you name. A smaller school, a bootcamp, a single-program provider, or one department that wants its pages written and published is a Managed GEO fit instead, and the two can run side by side.
- A free AI visibility audit of your program, department, catalog, and brochure templates, with a roadmap your web team executes
- Daily tracking of program-level questions per country and persona, against the institutions the engines name instead of you
- The sources the engines cite for each program, with You, competitor, or third-party ownership
- Monthly trend briefings: the institutions, sources, and questions that moved, with an owner for each action
- Reports cut by program, engine, country, and persona, with a login for the international office, each school, and comms
The platform behind the work
What your teams log in to
- Your mention rate split by who is asking: the undergraduate, the working professional, the parent, and the international applicant.
Visibility by Persona
- 21 checks on one URL of each template: access for 20 AI crawlers, structure, content depth, and the files engines read first.
GEO Audits
- Share of voice and position score against the institutions the engines name beside yours, and who gained or lost ground.
Competitor Research
From the first call
What enrollment and web teams ask us
Which institutions do you track us against?
The ones the engines name for your questions, which are rarely the ones in your peer group. We run your program-level questions first and read who got named per market, then agree the competitor set with you: a few named rivals per program, plus anyone the engines keep naming that you had not considered. We measure share of voice, position score, and movers against that set, and it can change as the answers do.
Can you track our programs in the countries we recruit from?
Each question is tracked in one country, in that market’s language, and every report filters by country, so the international office reads its own answer rather than a global average. Today the platform runs questions in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Greece. If a priority market of yours is not on that list, say so in the first call and we scope it before we quote.
Our site has tens of thousands of pages. What do you actually audit?
One URL of each template: a program page, a department page, a catalog entry, a brochure, a news article, and the home page, on each host and subdomain that matters. The 21 checks find what the template gets wrong, which is what every page built from it gets wrong, and the roadmap fixes it once. We check crawler access per host, because the rule that blocks the engines is usually in one robots.txt that nobody in marketing has opened.
Who on our side does the work?
Your web team ships the template and crawler fixes, your content team or the department rewrites the program pages, and comms works the sources. The roadmap names the owner and the order, and the monthly briefing shows what moved once they shipped. If a bootcamp, a single-program provider, or one department wants the writing and the fixes done for it, that is Managed GEO, and it can run beside the consulting work.
What happens when AI gets a fact about a program wrong?
The platform keeps every answer and every source it cited. A person on our team reads the answers for your questions, engine by engine, flags each claim that is wrong, outdated, or unfavorable, and traces it to the page the engine quoted. Usually that page is a stale third-party listing, or your own site saying the same thing three different ways. The roadmap fixes what you own and names the source to work on for the rest. We will not put a date on when an engine stops repeating it; you watch it change in the tracking.
See what AI is already saying about your brand.
A free audit shows you exactly where you stand across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Claude, Grok, and AI Overviews, and what it would take to close the gap.