Post-secondary institutions are entering a new era of search visibility – one where AI Overviews (AIO) increasingly influence how prospective students discover programs, understand options, and shortlist schools.
What AIO is revealing, very clearly, is a long-standing disconnect between how institutions structure their content and how students actually search.
Students Search Broadly. Institutions Publish Narrowly
In practice, many colleges and universities organize programs around internal academic terminology:
- Specific credentials
- Intake codes
- Stream names
- Program-level distinctions meaningful to administrators
Students do not search this way.
Early-stage prospective students search in broad, undecided, exploratory language, such as:
- “I want to study nursing”
- “How do I become a nurse in Ontario?”
- “Healthcare programs after high school”
- “Nursing diploma vs degree”
A college we worked with offered multiple nursing-related programs but did not have a single page that addressed “Nursing” as a field of study. Instead, information was fragmented across several narrowly defined program pages.
The result: the institution failed to appear for broad, high-intent searches – even though it offered relevant programs.
Why AI Overviews Make This Gap Worse
AI Overviews synthesize content based on semantic intent.
If a school lacks a page that clearly matches broad intent (“Nursing programs,” “Study nursing”), AIO has nothing to summarize from that institution. In those cases, Google surfaces:
- Government planning portals
- Third-party education directories
- Competing institutions with clearer discipline-level pages
AIO rewards comprehensive, intent-aligned content, not internal naming conventions.
This means schools that publish narrowly risk becoming invisible at the exact moment students begin their research.
Missing Pillar Content
One of the most common structural issues in post-secondary websites is the absence of comprehensive, high-level page that represents a broad topic or area of interest, organizing and linking related subtopics to align with how users search. This is known as pillar content.
An example of pillar content is a high-level, authoritative page for a field of study, such as:
- Nursing
- Business
- Engineering
- Healthcare
- Trades
These pages organize and contextualize program pages.
Pillar content helps AIO understand:
- What disciplines the institution offers
- Who those programs are for
- How programs differ
- How careers map to credentials
- What the admissions pathways look like
Without these pages, content remains fragmented, and AIO defaults to external sources.
AIO Rewards Explainer Content for Undecided Students
Most institutional content assumes students already know what they want.
AIO does not.
AI Overviews are heavily shaped by question-based, explainer-style queries, such as:
- “Which nursing pathway is right for me?”
- “Practical nursing vs BScN”
- “Nursing prerequisites explained”
- “What can you do with a nursing diploma?”
These are not program pages. They are intent pages.
When schools fail to publish this type of content, AIO fills the gap using third-party explanations – often before a student ever reaches the institution’s site.
The Analytics Problem Nobody Talks About
Many colleges and universities do not control their application process. Applications often occur through external, government-run portals, creating a fundamental measurement gap:
- Outbound clicks to the portal are not applications
- Applications cannot be tracked back to specific pages or queries
- Return visits from the portal lack context
- AIO visibility (or absence) is invisible in standard analytics
When conversions happen off-site, attribution breaks down.
AI Overviews Make Attribution Even Harder
AIO introduces an additional layer before the website.
Two blind spots now overlap:
- Students may get their early-stage information entirely from AIO or third-party sites
- Students may apply through a provincial portal without returning to the institution’s site
The institution sees fewer visits but cannot directly connect that decline to AIO visibility gaps – even though those gaps may be suppressing demand upstream.
Silos Make Everything Worse
Content silos are not just an organizational problem – they are an AIO and analytics problem.
Common silos include:
- Programs managed independently by departments
- Marketing disconnected from admissions
- SEO isolated from analytics
- Content created without a discipline-level strategy
When content is siloed:
- No one owns gateway pages
- Program clusters cannot be measured holistically
- AIO visibility is fragmented
- Marketing decisions rely on partial signals
Silos prevent institutions from seeing how students actually move from curiosity to intent.
What Can Be Measured (Even If Imperfect)
Even with external application portals, institutions are not powerless.
Meaningful proxy signals include:
- Outbound clicks to application portals (by discipline or page type)
- Return visitors from the portal domain
- Time-lag patterns between content publication and portal activity
- Micro-intent actions:
- Depth of program page engagement
- Guide downloads
- Video views
- Info-session signups
- “Apply Now” page visits
These signals become leading indicators when final conversions are untrackable.
The Practical Fix: Structure for AIO + Measurement
Effective institutions are doing four things:
- Building discipline-level gateway pages
- Anchors AIO visibility
- Creates measurable pathways
- Using student language first, institutional language second
- “Nursing Programs (Practical Nursing, BScN pathways…)”
- Publishing explainer content for undecided students
- Matches AIO query patterns
- Measuring program clusters, not pages
- “Nursing” as a performance unit, not four isolated URLs
When an institution:
- Lacks gateway pages
- Uses internal terminology
- Operates in silos
- Cannot track final conversions
- Does not monitor AIO visibility
Marketing decisions become guesswork.
Where Agencies Add Value
This is no longer about keywords.
Agencies can help institutions:
- Identify missing discipline-level entry points
- Rebuild content around student intent
- Align SEO, AIO visibility, and analytics
- Design measurement frameworks for off-site applications
- Break down silos between content, analytics, and recruitment
In the AIO era, visibility and measurement are inseparable.
A private college had been running Google Ads internally after working with me once before. But with international enrollment down – thanks to recent government caps – they were struggling to fill classes and wanted help improving performance.
When I asked how they measured success, they said:
| “We track views of the program page.”
WTF were they looking at?
If someone clicks your ad and lands on that page, of course the page gets a view. That doesn’t mean they’re interested – or even qualified! It just means they clicked on the ad.
To actually measure quality, we dug deeper. With a bit of coaching, they identified what really mattered:
| Clicks on “Apply Now” or “Talk to an Education Advisor.”
Now we’re setting up proper tracking, and I’m training their team across six sessions to:
- Build campaigns focused on high-value leads, not surface-level clicks
- Understand how politics and demand shifts affect strategy
- Optimize toward actual enrollment – not vanity metrics
This is the kind of clarity I deliver in the Is Your Marketing Working? program.
- About the Author
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Darlene is a search marketer, analyst, speaker, trainer, and owner of DriveTraffic Digital Marketing. She has been working in the digital marketing industry since the mid 90s and has narrowed her specialty to SEO, Google Ads and Google Analytics. She is especially interested in Google’s new Search Generative Experience and how businesses will need to adapt to remain visible. Want to see how DriveTraffic can help? Let’s chat!
