What Changed in How Students Discover Colleges Today

For years, many institutions have organised planning, strategy, budgets, and reporting around marketing activities that were easy to track and report on, even when the impact was unclear. Over time, this concentrated budget and attention in channels where results could be shown most directly and easily attributed, even though discovery has always happened across many places.

That expectation grew under enrollment pressure and budget scrutiny, with leaders required to justify every marketing dollar and try to measure everything, which created a strong push toward vanity metrics that are predictable, immediate, and easy to report. Over time, this pressure has shaped how strategies are built and how success is defined, and that habit has become part of how search marketing is managed across many institutions.

For most universities, Search marketing has been shaped by paid search, last click attribution, and a Google-centric view of SEO. This model was built on the assumption that search follows a linear path: one query results in a program page visit, and visibility equals influence. It worked when Google was the main way people discovered information online, and the environment in which they formed their opinions and made decisions was smaller and easier to influence.

Today, due to the rise of AI, the ever-changing behavior of online information discovery, and the growing awareness of the value of education, this journey has become much more complex within a larger ecosystem spanning multiple discovery channels and platforms, over which higher ed marketers have little to no control.

That approach kept the digital marketing budget focused on metrics that were easier to attribute and report, allowing platforms like Google Ads to tell us where a conversation originated. All of this, when the student’s decision to submit an RFI or application has already been shaped by a longer sequence of discovery and validation spanning many places. This gap shows up in how institutions build their search marketing strategies, allocate resources, and report results.

Online college discovery has gone beyond Google for quite some time, and research has been pointing that way. Yet the industry ignored the data and remained overly focused on a single student-acquisition channel: Google Ads and Google-centric SEO, which carried most of the weight. 

When budgets and targets are built around branded performance, teams end up paying to capture prospects whose decision has already been shaped by non-branded research earlier, and they keep underinvesting in the discovery channels that actually influenced that final decision.

Most institutions are currently showing up strongest very late in the student journey, when competition becomes tight, and attention is expensive, while the earlier work that helps students understand, compare, and build confidence in their enrollment decisions remains underfunded and undermined.

As a result, institutions often overestimate the impact of where they appear and underestimate the complexity of decision-making.

Our State of College Search study found that when students start exploring their college options, 4 out of 10 do not have any school in mind, and 3 out of 10 have a few schools on their list but remain open to new options. This means that 7 out of 10 prospective students are open to being influenced by what they discover in their college search journey, with queries and questions about programs, outcomes, cost, fit, and the doubts and fears behind them.

The beginning of the journey is where students form preferences, start comparing what feels credible, and decide what belongs in the set of options worth taking seriously. By the time a student searches using a school name, a meaningful part of the influence and perception has already been built. 

To reach and influence today’s students, colleges must increase their visibility beyond search engines into the broader system of digital discovery, where influence is built over time, across contexts, and through repeated alignment between what the institution says, what others confirm, and what the students are looking for.

This has become more complex due to the following three shifts in the way colleges are discovered online today:

1. Control has shifted from institutions to discovery platforms.
   The platform, not the institution, now determines how much of the story is visible and in what format. For colleges, this means fewer students will ever visit their carefully crafted program pages. When the control shifts to external sites and platforms, we end up needing to maintain a presence on “rented land” that institutions may or may not control.
   
   
2. Trust has shifted from official sites to peer-driven platforms.
   Our State of College Search study found that the average prospective student interacts with five to six digital touchpoints before submitting an application, showing how trust is distributed and how institutions have less control over the narrative. If a student believes the answer they see in an AI Search or Reddit is more trustworthy than what they’d get from a .edu website, they won’t bother clicking, turning the website from a discovery into a confirmation channel.
   
   This raises the burden on the website experience, because students arrive with context and with questions shaped elsewhere, and the site needs to confirm the story, back it with proof, and remove doubt at the moment students are ready to act.
   
3. Behavior has shifted from “search” to “discovery.”
   Prospective students don’t just “search” linearly. They swipe, tap, scroll, ask, and discover. They encounter options earlier and in more places. This means visibility is no longer triggered by a single keyword. Visibility is shaped across a broader discovery ecosystem, where platforms show content based on complex patterns of artificial intelligence, user behavior, history, and personalized context.

These three fundamental shifts in platform control, user trust, and student behavior lead to an unavoidable conclusion: the traditional, Google-centric model of search marketing is obsolete. An operating system built to optimize for ads, rankings, and traffic on a single platform cannot solve the enrollment problem because enrollment is not a search problem; it is a decision-making problem. 

Decisions are shaped by trust, perception, and the consistency of signals that students encounter across multiple sources. Visibility on Google alone may raise awareness, but it does not automatically build enrollment confidence.

In the last three years, search has changed faster and more profoundly than ever. The emergence of AI Search platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity has reshaped how people discover information, creating real competition for Google and changing the relationship between search, traffic, and websites. 

According to research by Datos and SparkToro, Google is sending less and less traffic to the open web, with 58% of queries ending without a single click. Out of a thousand searches, only about 400 may ever end up outside a Google property, including an external website, with the rest satisfied by Google’s own properties or leading to another search. This is a fundamental re-architecture of how and where information is distributed.

A study we conducted on .edu sites indicates that traffic to university websites is also declining, and visit intent is changing due to AI Search.

As zero-click search and AI answers take over early discovery, fewer people will click on search results, so schools must earn visibility inside AI-generated answers if they want to be discovered by their future students. 

However, even though organic search traffic to higher ed websites is showing signs of decline, that does not mean schools will see a decline in conversions. As a Semrush study found, AI search visitors tend to be more qualified than traditional search visitors because they have already consumed basic information and are one step closer to taking action. 

By the time a student reaches an institution’s website, most have already been informed about the institution and its programs through AI, and they are looking for confirmation that the story they pieced together elsewhere makes sense, shifting the intent of website visitors from information to validation and conversion.

This indicates a shift from funnel-building to pipeline-building, making top-of-funnel vanity data largely irrelevant in today’s online information discovery era.

Higher education marketing teams have been facing intense enrollment pressure, being asked to justify every marketing dollar spent. This pressure has created an institutional need for metrics that are predictable, immediate, and easy to report to the board.

This need for fast, tangible numbers led the industry to rely heavily on the RFI volume. This focus pulled budgets toward paid search because it could deliver a high volume of leads quickly. Once that became the main success metric, Google Ads became the easiest lever to pull any time leadership asks for more leads. 

The quantity-over-quality approach pushed teams toward brand campaigns because they tend to deliver strong results in reports, especially for students who have already made up their minds about an institution’s brand within the broader discovery ecosystem. In that ecosystem, SEO remained underfunded and was reduced to traffic goals, even though most early discovery began with non-branded questions.

Paid search kept getting funded because (1) it could generate lead volume quickly, (2) those leads could be easily reported on, passing the ball to the admissions team to nurture, and (3) because most institutions operated under an assumption that being shown when people search with a brand name was enough. 

As a result, higher education became one of the top spenders on Google Ads, not necessarily because everyone is convinced it’s the best way to fill the pipeline, but because it was the most efficient way to produce that specific metric that internal reporting demanded.

Strategies that are built on a quantity of quality approach are designed to favor channels such as Google Ads to produce “enough” leads to reach certain targets and call the “job done”, even though recent research has been telling us that most students deliberately ignore those ads, and their leads-to-enrollment conversion rate barely meets the investment. 

As ad costs continue to rise, competition tightens, and results become harder to sustain, reliance on this approach becomes unsustainable for achieving enrollment goals.

The problem with this model is that it’s built on a fundamental misunderstanding. The system is often set up to give 100% of the credit to the final click, assuming the channel that captured the student’s contact information is the one that influenced their decision.

This model completely ignores the complex, often invisible influencing moments that occur before that final click. 

For years, higher education has treated Google’s organic traffic as “FREE.” If an institution paid for Google Ads, that was “paid traffic.” If it came through organic search, it was “free.” But SEO always required investment in people, time, tools, agencies, and content. Calling that “free” devalued the SEO discipline itself.

By labeling organic search as “a free channel,” the industry framed SEO as a low-cost performance channel, ignoring its true power in impacting discoverability and decision-making through non-branded search queries.

Our study found that 81% of traffic to the top 100 .edu sites is driven by non-branded search. In a world where 7 out of 10 students start their college search with no school in mind (hence, non-branded search), this is a clear signal of how overlooked SEO has been in higher education. Non-branded search is where students look for programs, outcomes, cost, and fit before they know who to trust. That is the kind of visibility higher ed should pursue.

One other misconception is that SEO and Google are often used interchangeably. 

Search has always been a human behavior, the way people try to make sense of uncertainty. It was about earning trust in the moment of information discovery. It was about influencing those moments, but we have never treated it like that. 

Somewhere along the way, search marketing stopped evolving in line with the need it was meant to serve. The SEO discipline remained too focused on specific search engines (e.g., Google), even as new technologies like AI were introduced, search behavior changed, and the discovery process itself became something far broader, more dynamic, and more complex.

It is time to revisit that and realign it with how students actually search, evaluate, and build trust in today’s information discovery environment.

For years, we have been operating under the promise that if we appear in front of the right students at the right time, they’ll come to us. That belief shaped how the industry approached visibility. We optimized for rankings, traffic, and impressions, convinced that being visible meant being chosen by our future students.

Students on the other end of the screen are not simply searching for more information. They can get all the information they want elsewhere, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI search engines. What they are trying to figure out is who to believe. They’re looking for signals of consistency, proof, and credibility. They want to know: Does this institution deliver what it promises? Do students like me succeed here?

Visibility indicates that students have encountered an institution. It does not tell us whether they believe what they see or feel ready to act. Think of how you hire a lawyer, accountant, or doctor. You might start with a search, but you only move forward after reading reviews, listening to other people’s experiences, and seeing proof that they deliver.

Choosing a college follows the same pattern. Each claim students see sends them to look for confirmation elsewhere. Every time information aligns, trust grows. When it clashes, confidence falls.

An institution might still appear in search results. But if that visibility isn’t backed by trust and influence across the entire online discovery ecosystem, it’s just background noise that does not drive enrollment impact.

Between being visible and being chosen, three critical shifts are needed. First, Visibility must evolve into Trust, the moment when a student begins to believe that what an institution says is credible and what they promise is real. Second, Trust must evolve into Influence.

This is when that credibility starts to shape their perception and decision-making, and only then does Influence become Action, when students feel confident enough to move forward and submit an RFI or fill out an application.

For many enrollment teams, Visibility still means appearing only in paid search, and this is where they allocate the majority of their digital marketing budget. Today, that channel alone does not capture the full demand (and if we’re being honest, it never did) because of the low trust in paid results and the diversity of information discovery itself.

Colleges aren’t becoming harder to find because students have stopped searching for them. They’re becoming harder to find because students aren’t discovering information in the same places or ways that most institutions still build their search strategies around.

This is what we refer to as the Visibility Gap, an information gap between where students gather and verify what matters and where institutions believe visibility and influence are created.

To close that gap, institutions need a new approach that is adaptable to technological changes and grounded in real college discovery behavior.

The higher ed industry needs a strategic, practical framework to reach today’s students across the full, complex discovery ecosystem. A delivery methodology that is based on research at its roots, built for how people discover information today, structured enough to guide teams through delivery, yet flexible enough to adapt.

The next section introduces this new approach, showing how higher ed marketing teams can plan, execute, and measure their presence in the era of information discovery.