How Is AI Changing SEO for Higher Education Websites?
Sep 3, 2025
If you’re worried about your website’s recent decline in organic traffic, you’re not alone. From prospective students' rising usage of AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to Google's own AI developments, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned about your university’s SEO performance metrics right now.
Key Takeaways
The usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) continues to grow at an accelerating rate, with recent data showing 58% of U.S. adults under 30 have used ChatGPT at least once.
Studies show that Google’s latest AI updates (like AI Overviews and AI Mode) will also decrease organic traffic for numerous websites.
To succeed in this new AI era, universities must update their SEO strategies by optimizing for AI search alongside traditional search.
What are the significant AI changes happening right now?
The growing impact of AI on the SEO landscape can be seen through three key developments:
- Growing usage of LLMs
- Google AI Overviews
- Google AI Mode
Understanding these developments is crucial for maintaining your institution’s online visibility and effectively recruiting prospective students through SEO efforts.
What are LLMs?
Large Language Models, or LLMs, are advanced predictive language models trained on massive amounts of web text. They are designed to understand and generate human-like text, engage in conversational interactions, and provide direct answers to queries.
A notable example is ChatGPT, which was launched in November 2022 and has experienced widespread adoption, reaching nearly 800 million weekly active users as of April 2025. Other major LLMs include Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, and Google's Gemini.
How are LLMs changing SEO?
LLMs are slowly changing the SEO ecosystem by altering user search behavior and what constitutes as "visibility" online. Since these tools primarily focus on providing users with direct answers rather than the ten blue links typically seen in traditional search engines (such as Google or Bing), this could lead to fewer website visitors as their adoption grows over time.
But just to be clear, LLM searches are nowhere close to overtaking Google’s over 14 billion searches per day, despite what you may have heard.
Start tracking AI search performance
Optimize Your Content for Both Traditional Search and AI Search
Update your web analytics platform (e.g., Google Analytics) to ensure you track incoming traffic across different AI tools and pinpoint which pages this traffic uses to enter and convert on across your website.
Update your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from only tracking organic clicks and keyword rankings within search engines to regularly measuring brand mentions, link citations, and share of voice across different AI tools.
Not sure how to tackle all this?
That’s where we come into play! As the Agency of Preference®, TrendyMinds is at the forefront of experimenting with new ways to win in this new AI search landscape and applying what we’ve learned to each higher education client we work with.