From SEO to GEO and AEO: Upgrade your content for maximum AI visibility

No one looking to increase applications and enrollment at their institution can afford to ignore AI visibility. While we still need to rank well in traditional search, our visibility to prospective students (and all our other audiences) depends on being mentioned and cited by AI search and chatbots. That means that, in addition to SEO (search engine optimization), we need to start working on our GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization). This session will get you started with GEO and AEO by leading you through the process of updating an academic program page for maximum AI visibility. We'll begin by looking at what we know about how AI search and chatbots read the web, how they understand your institution and how they formulate answers. This will reveal why SEO continues to play an important role in the age of AI. Then we'll use some freely available tools to evaluate our institutions' current AI performance and discuss what paid tools offer that might be worth the cost. This knowledge in hand, we'll lay a strong foundation for our revised program page by examining our core message pillars and reworking them for an answer-oriented world. We'll also learn a technique for aligning your team around core institutional and program facts. With clarified messaging and core facts in hand, we'll sketch out a redesign of our program page, using content design tactics that can feed correct facts to AI systems and make our pages more likely to be cited in AI answers. Finally, we'll look at ways to improve our web governance to ensure consistent messaging, factual accuracy, and maximum AI visibility across our websites. You should come to this session with:

• A program page on their site that they want to improve.
• Access to Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for the site on which their program page lives.

Familiarity with SEO best practices will be helpful, but is not required.