Picture a parent at 11 pm, phone in hand, typing: "Which engineering colleges near me have good placements and a girls' hostel, fees under 2 lakh?"
There's no list of ten blue links. An AI-written answer sits at the top, neatly summarised, with a few college names in it. She reads it. Maybe she taps one. Maybe she just screenshots the whole thing and drops it into the family WhatsApp group.
So here's the question for every admissions team: is your college in that answer? And if it is, is the answer right?
Your website is being read by a very fast intern
The easiest way to think about AI search is an intern who has read thousands of pages in a few seconds and now has to write the summary. It's quick. It's not fussy. It grabs whatever is easy to read.
Now look at your own website through the intern's eyes. Fee structure inside a scanned PDF. Placement record as a pretty image in a slider. A course page that says "world-class faculty" and then stops. The intern has nothing to write down, so it writes about a different college.
Does it really change how people click? A bit.
Pew Research Center watched how real people used Google in the US in 2025. When an AI summary showed up, they clicked a normal result about half as often as when it didn't (8% of visits against 15%). Worth remembering: that's US data, Google only, so it's no forecast for Indian or Gulf students. But the direction is easy to see. More people get their answer without ever visiting a website.
So the job changes. Your site has to be the source the answer is built from, and it has to be worth visiting once they do arrive.
Five fixes that actually matter
- Let the crawlers in. Check robots.txt, and check any CDN or firewall sitting in front of the site. A security setting from three years ago can quietly lock the door.
- Put the answers on the page, as text. Fees, eligibility, duration, intake dates, scholarships. If a parent has to download a brochure to find the fee, so does the intern.
- Write like a good counsellor, not a brochure. Use the questions people really ask as headings. "Is there a hostel?" beats "Campus Life" every time. Then answer in two plain sentences.
- Be specific. "Excellent placements" tells nobody anything. "Placement figures for the 2025 batch, from our placement cell" gives something to quote. The researchers who coined the term GEO found that pages with concrete facts, named sources and real quotations got picked up more than vague copy, and that stuffing in keywords did nothing at all.
- Keep it fresh. Last year's fee on this year's page is worse than having no page. Put a date on anything that changes.
The 20-minute test
Write down ten questions a parent might ask about your institution. Run each one through Google, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Then look at what comes back. Does it name you? Are the fees right? Is it quoting your site, or some aggregator's page from 2021?
You'll probably find something mildly horrifying. Good. That's your to-do list. Run the test again next month. Google has started rolling out AI reporting in Search Console, but not to everyone yet, so for now this manual check is your best friend.
Don't chase tricks. Be clear, be specific, be current. It's what you'd want any visitor to find anyway, and the AI is really just a visitor who reads very fast.
If you'd like a second pair of eyes on how your website reads to search engines and AI tools, talk to the Chillipages team.
