Will AI Find Your School?

7 Aug

AI Search Is Changing How Families Find Your School. Here's What That Actually Means.

If you've noticed people talking about "AI search," "ChatGPT traffic," or "AIO" and wondered whether it's something you need to worry about, take a breath. It isn't a crisis. It's simply the next chapter in a story we've been writing together for years - and, as with every previous chapter (mobile-first, Google updates, social media), the schools who stay calm, informed, and a little ahead of the curve come out the other side just fine. Often better than fine.

This post is our attempt to explain, in plain language, what's actually happening with search right now, what the early data from our own school clients is telling us, and how we're already adapting your websites to make the most of it.

1. SEO - Still the Foundation, Still Doing Its Job

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of making sure your school's website shows up when a parent, prospective student, or local family types something into Google. Good SEO has always rested on a few timeless principles: clear, well-organised content; fast-loading, mobile-friendly pages; accurate information (term dates, admissions criteria, contact details); and a site that genuinely answers the questions people are asking.

None of that has gone away. In fact, it matters more than ever, because the next generation of AI-powered search tools still lean heavily on well-established, well-ranked websites when deciding what to trust. A page that already ranks well in Google is significantly more likely to be picked up and referenced by AI tools too - the two are increasingly linked rather than separate battles. So the groundwork we've done together on your school's site - clean navigation, strong content, proper technical setup - isn't being replaced. It's being built on.

2. AIO - The New Layer on Top

AIO stands for AI Optimisation (you'll also hear it called GEO, "Generative Engine Optimisation," or AEO, "Answer Engine Optimisation" - they all mean roughly the same thing). It's the practice of making sure your school's information is understood, trusted, and referenced correctly when someone asks an AI tool - Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity - a question, rather than typing a traditional search and clicking through a list of links.

Here's the shift in plain terms: we don't have Irish-specific data yet, but a recent US survey found over half of parents now use AI tools like ChatGPT to research and compare schools for their children - and it's reasonable to assume that a similar shift is underway here (although I would imagine it strongly varies based on intake demographic). Instead of scrolling through ten blue links, more parents are asking an AI assistant something like "what are the best schools in Cork for a child interested in music" or "what's the admissions process for [school name]," and getting a conversational answer back - sometimes with your school mentioned by name, sometimes not.

What decides whether your school gets mentioned? Largely the same qualities that make a good website in the first place, with a few extra considerations:

Clarity and structure - content that answers a specific question directly (e.g. "How do I apply for a place at [School]?") tends to get picked up and referenced far more than vague, marketing-style copy.
Freshness - pages and news posts updated recently are noticeably more likely to be used as a source than pages that haven't been touched in years.
Credibility markers - specific facts, figures and genuine detail (rather than generic filler) give AI tools more confidence to cite you.
Being findable everywhere, not just Google - AI tools draw on a wide mix of sources, so your school's presence across your own site, local press, and community mentions all feed into the picture. Reddit is consistently the single most-cited source across AI answer engines in 2026, accounting for roughly 40% of multi-engine aggregate citation frequency — so, for a school, having genuine parent/community discussion happening about you on Reddit carries real weight with how AI tools form their answers.

None of this requires throwing out what we've built. It requires refining it - and that refinement is already part of how we're approaching website refreshes, new pages and content for our school clients.

3. What the Data From Your Own Sites Is Telling Us

Rather than relying on generic industry commentary, we looked at real traffic data across seven of our client schools - a genuine cross-section of demographics and locations around Ireland - to see what's actually happening on the ground. We compared traffic volumes from this school year (01/09/25 - today) with the same period in the previous year.

Changes in Traffic

A few honest observations:

Every single school is up. Not one school in our sample saw a decline in website traffic. That's worth sitting with, because a lot of the noise online right now is about AI "stealing" website traffic. That may be true in some sectors, but for schools - where families are making a genuinely important, research-heavy decision, the opposite seems to be happening. People are researching more, through more channels, and a well-optimised school site is capturing that interest rather than losing it.

The spread reflects each school's own context, not a scoreboard. A 2% gain and a 92% gain are both genuinely good news - they simply started from different places. A school with a smaller catchment, a more established reputation, or a website that was already well-optimised will naturally see a gentler curve than a school that's growing its digital presence from a lower base, or one whose community does a lot of its research online before ever picking up the phone. Location, size, existing digital maturity, and how competitive the local school landscape is all shape the number. There's no universal benchmark here, and no school in this data is "behind" - every one of them is moving in the right direction, at a pace that makes sense for their own situation.

This is early days, and that's an opportunity. AI search traffic is still a small slice of overall traffic industry-wide, but it's growing quickly and consistently month on month. Schools that build good habits now. Clear content, regular updates, well-answered questions are positioning themselves to keep benefiting as that slice grows, rather than scrambling to catch up later.

AI search Webinar

A Few Practical Things Worth Doing Now

Before we get to what we're handling on our end, here are five simple, concrete things - some for you, some for us, that genuinely move the needle for both traditional and AI search. Nothing dramatic, nothing that requires a rebuild.

Build out a proper FAQ page, in the words families actually use. Think about the questions you're asked at every open evening and every enrolment enquiry - "Do you offer transition year?", "What's the uniform policy?", "Is there a bus service from [area]?", "What subjects are on offer for Leaving Cert?". Answering these directly and clearly on your website, in a genuine question-and-answer format, is one of the most reliable ways to be picked up and quoted accurately by AI tools, because that's exactly the format they're built to extract from. It also just makes life easier for parents.

Post your news natively on the website rather than embedding it from an app or third-party platform. If your school news currently lives inside an embedded feed (from a communications app, a social platform, or similar), it's largely invisible to both Google and AI tools - they can only read what's actually part of your website's own page content. Publishing news articles as proper pages on your site, even when you're also sharing them elsewhere, means that content can be found, indexed, and referenced.

Add alt text to your images - but don't rely on it alone. Alt text (the short written description behind an image) is read by AI tools and does genuinely help both accessibility and how confidently your content gets picked up. That said, the evidence is clear that it works best as a support layer, not a substitute: if an important fact only exists inside an image or a photo caption, AI tools are unlikely to reliably pull it out. The best approach is the belt-and-braces one - write key facts in the normal text of the page, and add good, descriptive alt text on top for everything else. We're building this into our standard image workflow across all managed sites.

Don't underestimate direct traffic. QR codes on printed enrolment packs, newsletters, noticeboards, and event signage - alongside a memorable web address on jerseys, buses, or local sponsorship - all send people straight to your site rather than through a search engine at all. Beyond the obvious convenience, this kind of direct, "typed-in" or scanned traffic is also a quiet trust signal to Google and AI tools alike: a site that people go to directly, again and again, reads as more established and more authoritative than one that only ever appears via search. It's a simple, low-tech way to strengthen your school's digital presence that doesn't depend on any algorithm at all.

Keep an eye on your Reddit presence, even if you can't control it. Reddit has quietly become one of the most heavily relied-upon sources across AI search tools, because genuine, first-hand community discussion carries real trust with them (for better or worse). You can't manufacture that the way you would a webpage - it works because it's real (hopefully) parents and locals talking honestly (again, hopefully). What you can do is keep half an eye on relevant local threads, gently correct anything factually wrong, and make sure your own website has accurate information for any conversation to point back to.

4. How We're Already Helping - and What Comes Next

This is exactly the kind of shift we exist to manage on your behalf, so you don't have to think about it day to day. In practice, that means:

Auditing existing content for clarity and "answerability" - making sure your admissions, curriculum, and key information pages directly answer the questions families are actually asking.
Keeping content fresh - our managed services model already includes regular updates; we're now weighting that toward the pages that matter most for both SEO and AIO.
Structuring pages properly behind the scenes, so search engines and AI tools alike can read and trust your content accurately.
Monitoring, not guessing - we're tracking traffic patterns like the ones above across all our school clients, so decisions are based on real data specific to schools, not generic marketing advice.
Bringing this knowledge to your team - this is also part of the thinking behind the Screenzest Digital Academy, where we're building practical, jargon-free training for the people in your school who manage communications day to day, so this knowledge doesn't just live with us. More about this in the coming months.

The honest summary: AI search isn't something to fear, and it isn't something to chase frantically either. It's a natural evolution of the same principles good school websites have always followed - be clear, be current, be genuinely helpful to the families reading - and it rewards schools who've already invested in doing things properly. Which, if you're reading this, you have.

As always, if you'd like to talk through what this means specifically for your school's site, we're just a call or email away.

- Michel

Michel Colaci