How to Optimize Your Website for AI Search

A Guide for Higher Education and Brand Leaders

I ran a test last week.

I took ten college homepages and fed them into ChatGPT, asking it to summarize what each institution offered. Then I compared those summaries to what the institutions actually said about themselves on their strategic planning sites and in their admissions materials.

Seven out of ten were significantly misrepresented. Not because the AI was wrong. Because the websites were structurally incomprehensible to machines.

Beautiful design. But invisible to AI.

If you want AI systems to understand your institution accurately, to cite you as credible, and to recommend you when students ask questions, you need to structure your content for machine comprehension.

This isn't theoretical. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and Claude are reading your website right now. They're forming conclusions about who you are, what you offer, and whether you're worth recommending.

Here's how to make sure they get it right.

Step 1: Audit What AI Actually Sees

Before you optimize anything, you need to know what AI currently understands about you.

Run this test:

Go to ChatGPT or Claude. Ask: "What can you tell me about Skidmore College? What programs do they offer? What makes them distinctive?"

Don't give it your URL. Just ask the question cold.

What comes back is what the AI has synthesized from all available sources: your website, news articles, reviews, social media, Reddit threads. Everything.

Is it accurate? Is it what you want prospective students to hear? Is it differentiated, or does it sound like every other liberal arts college?

Now do the same test with specific queries:

• "What does it cost to attend Skidmore College?"

• "What kind of student thrives at Skidmore College?"

• "What career outcomes do Skidmore graduates have?"

• "Does Skidmore have strong undergraduate research opportunities?"

The gaps you find are your roadmap.

If you have ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, or Perplexity Pro, you can do direct URL testing:

Paste your homepage URL and ask: "Can you analyze this website and tell me what this institution offers and what makes it distinctive?"

The AI will crawl your site in real-time and give you feedback on what it can and can't extract.

Tools to use:

• ChatGPT (free tier works for cold testing; Plus/Pro needed for URL crawling)

• Claude.ai (free tier works for cold testing; Pro needed for URL crawling)

• Perplexity.ai (automatically searches the web, free tier works)

• Google's AI Overview (if available in your region)

Document every inaccuracy, every vague answer, every place where AI said "I don't have specific information about that."

Those are the holes you're about to fill.

Step 2: Implement Schema Markup on Key Pages

Schema markup is metadata that explicitly tells AI what each piece of content represents.

Without it, AI has to guess. With it, AI knows.

Priority pages for schema implementation:

Program pages: Use EducationalOccupationalProgram schema to tag:

• Program name

• Degree type (BA, BS, MA, etc.)

• Duration (4 years, 2 years, 18 months)

• Delivery format (on-campus, online, hybrid)

• Cost (tuition per year or total program cost)

• Career outcomes (specific job titles, median salaries)

• Prerequisites

Faculty pages: Use Person schema to tag:

• Name and title

• Department affiliation

• Research areas

• Publications

• Contact information

Event pages: Use Event schema to tag:

• Event name and type

• Date and time

• Location (physical or virtual)

• Registration details

Organization information: Use CollegeOrUniversity schema to tag:

• Institution name

• Location and address

• Accreditation

• Founding date

• Campus facilities

How to implement schema:

You don't need to code this manually. Most modern CMS platforms (Drupal, WordPress, Modern Campus) have plugins or modules that generate schema markup automatically.

For Drupal: Use the Schema.org Metatag module
For WordPress: Use Yoast SEO Premium or Rank Math
For Modern Campus: Work with your web team to add structured data fields to page templates

Test your implementation:

Use Google's Rich Results Test tool: search.google.com/test/rich-results

Paste your URL. The tool will show you what schema markup Google (and by extension, other AI systems) can read.

Fix errors. Validate. Repeat for all priority pages.

Step 3: Restructure Content Around Questions

AI systems are trained on question-answer pairs.

When someone asks "What does it cost to attend Skidmore College?" AI looks for explicit answers to that question on your site.

If the answer is buried in a PDF linked from a financial aid page that's three clicks deep, AI won't find it.

Restructure your high-traffic pages with FAQ sections at the top.

Not hidden in an accordion at the bottom. Not on a separate FAQ page. Right there, at the top of the page, in plain text.

Example: Program page structure

[Program Name]
[One-sentence description]

**Quick Facts**
- Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art
- Duration: 4 years (120 credits)
- Format: On-campus with study abroad options
- Cost: $65,000 per year (tuition, room, board)
- Average starting salary: $48,000

**What will I learn?**
[Answer in 2-3 sentences]

**What can I do with this degree?**
[List of specific careers with links to alumni stories]

**Who teaches in this program?**
[Faculty highlights with links to full profiles]

**How do I apply?**
[Clear steps with links]

[Rest of page content]

This structure gives AI everything it needs to answer common questions accurately.

Use tools like AnswerThePublic and AlsoAsked to identify the actual questions students are searching for.

Don't guess what they want to know. Look at the data.

For "studio art degree," common questions include:

• What can you do with a studio art degree?

• How long does it take to get an art degree?

• Is a studio art degree worth it?

• What jobs can you get with an art degree?

Your content needs to answer these questions explicitly, on the page, in natural language.

Step 4: Build Semantic Connections Between Pages

AI understands your institution by following the connections between your pages.

If your program pages don't link to faculty pages, if faculty pages don't link to research, if research doesn't link to career outcomes, AI sees disconnected fragments. Not a coherent institution.

Create a linking strategy that reflects real relationships:

From program pages, link to:

• Faculty who teach in the program

• Research happening in the department

• Alumni working in related fields

• Campus resources (labs, studios, clinics)

• Career services and outcomes data

From faculty pages, link to:

• Their department and programs

• Their research projects

• Publications and presentations

• Courses they teach

• Student work they've supervised

From research pages, link to:

• Faculty leading the research

• Students involved in the research

• Departments and programs connected to the work

• Real-world applications and outcomes

• News coverage or publications about the research

From alumni/career pages, link to:

• Programs they graduated from

• Faculty who mentored them

• Current job postings in related fields

• Industry partnerships

The goal: from any page on your site, AI should be able to navigate to related information within 2-3 clicks.

Most CMS platforms have plugins that can audit your internal linking structure and identify orphaned pages (pages with no internal links pointing to them).

For WordPress: Use Link Whisper
For Drupal: Use the Linkchecker module

Run the audit. Fix the gaps. Build the web of connections that AI needs to understand your story.

Step 5: Add Structured Summaries to Every Major Page

AI systems prioritize content at the top of the page.

If your homepage starts with a hero image and a vague tagline, that's what AI reads first. And that's what shapes its understanding of your institution.

Add a 2-3 sentence summary at the very top of every major page that explicitly states:

• What this page is about

• Who it's for

• What action they should take

Example: Homepage summary

"Skidmore College is a residential liberal arts college in Saratoga Springs, New York, enrolling 2,500 undergraduate students across 43 majors. Creative Thought Matters here: we combine rigorous academics with hands-on creative practice, preparing graduates for careers in the arts, sciences, business, education, and beyond."

Clear. Specific. No marketing fluff. Just facts that AI can extract and cite accurately.

Example: Program page summary

"The Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art at Skidmore combines technical training in painting, sculpture, printmaking, and digital media with critical theory and art history. Students work in professional-grade studios, exhibit their work publicly, and pursue careers as practicing artists, art educators, curators, and arts administrators."

This tells AI exactly what the program is, what students learn, and what careers they pursue.

Put this summary in a visible <div> at the top of the page. Don't hide it in alt text or metadata. Make it readable by both humans and machines.

Step 6: Create a Living Knowledge Graph

Your institution has implicit knowledge that AI can't see.

Faculty expertise. Research partnerships. Community connections. Student outcomes. Alumni networks.

Most of this lives in silos: faculty CVs, departmental reports, alumni databases, news archives.

AI can't connect the dots unless you make those connections explicit.

Build a knowledge graph by creating hub pages that aggregate related information:

Research hub: A central page that links to all active research projects, organized by theme or department. Each project page includes faculty involved, students participating, funding sources, publications, and real-world applications.

Faculty expertise directory: A searchable directory (not just an alphabetical list) that tags faculty by research interests, courses taught, and community partnerships. When AI searches for "faculty who study climate change," it finds this page.

Career outcomes hub: A central page that shows where graduates work, organized by major and industry. Include specific job titles, companies, salary ranges (if available), and links to alumni profiles or stories.

Community partnerships page: A list of every organization your institution partners with: research institutions, nonprofits, government agencies, businesses. Tag each partnership with the academic programs involved and the outcomes achieved.

These hub pages serve as maps for AI. They make implicit knowledge explicit.

Technical implementation:

Most CMS platforms support taxonomy systems that let you tag content with categories and keywords. Use these taxonomies consistently across all content types.

For Drupal: Use the Taxonomy module with custom vocabularies
For WordPress: Use custom taxonomies and tag archives

Then create dynamic hub pages that pull in all content tagged with specific terms.

When AI crawls your site, it sees not just individual pages, but the relationships between them.

Step 7: Monitor and Iterate

AI systems evolve. Your content needs to evolve with them.

Set up a quarterly monitoring process:

Run the ChatGPT audit again.
Ask the same questions you asked in Step 1. Has the accuracy improved? Are there new gaps?

Check Google Search Console.
Look at which pages are ranking for AI Overviews. Which queries are triggering your content in AI-generated responses? Double down on what's working.

Use AI-specific monitoring tools:

• BrightEdge: Tracks your visibility in AI-generated search results

• Semrush: Shows which keywords trigger AI Overviews and whether your site appears

• Ahrefs: Monitors backlinks and citations from AI-generated content

Track these metrics monthly:

• Number of pages with schema markup implemented

• Number of internal links per page (target: 5-10)

• Number of questions answered explicitly on key pages

• Visibility in AI-generated search results (measured via BrightEdge or manual testing)

When AI gets something wrong about your institution, fix it immediately.

Find the source page. Add clarity. Add schema. Add explicit answers. Test again.

This isn't a one-time project. It's an ongoing practice.

What Success Looks Like

You'll know your optimization is working when:

• AI systems cite your institution accurately when answering questions

• ChatGPT can explain your programs, costs, and outcomes without vague generalities

• Perplexity includes you in recommendations for specific student profiles

• Google's AI Overviews feature your content prominently

• Prospective students arrive at your site already well-informed (because AI educated them)

Most importantly, you'll see it in your analytics. Qualified traffic increases. Bounce rates decrease. Time on site increases. Because the students who arrive already know you're a fit.

AI isn't replacing your website. It's becoming the front door to it.

Make sure AI is telling the right story.