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Very soon, a prospective student looking at universities might not start with Google.
They might start with ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude.
They could ask for a part-time MBA under a certain price, available online, with strong graduate outcomes, and let the AI do some of the early research for them.
The AI search might compare program pages, check tuition fees, look at entry requirements and pull together a shortlist.
So your university website might not even get an actual visit from the student.
But the information on it may still have helped decide whether your university made the shortlist.
That's a fairly big change in how people find and compare higher education options.
And it means your website now has another type of visitor to think about.
AI isn't clicking around your website like a student
A prospective student might land on a course page, skim the intro, click through to fees, open accommodation in another tab, and eventually piece together what they need.
An AI assistant may do something quite different.
It might pull information from several pages at once, or retrieve specific sections of your website in response to a question.
In some cases, it could access structured data directly rather than working its way through the website in the way a person would.
So yes, your design, navigation, photography and copy still matter. Very much so.
But the information sitting underneath all of that needs to be easy to understand too.
If your course page clearly shows the programme name, qualification, fees, delivery method, application deadline and entry requirements, an AI tool has a much better chance of getting the answer right.
If that information is spread across three pages, two PDFs and an old faculty page, things get trickier.
Be specific where students need specifics
We've all seen higher education course pages full of phrases like "transformative learning" and "world-class teaching."
There's nothing wrong with good marketing copy.
But if a student asks an AI assistant, "Can I study this course part-time and how much does it cost?" those phrases aren't going to help them, and it’s not going to surface an answer.
The useful information is the simple stuff.
- What's the qualification?
- How long does it take?
- Can I study online?
- What are the entry requirements?
- When do applications close?
- How much will I pay?
Structured content is something we've talked about before, and it’s more important now than ever.
Instead of every department writing those details differently in free text, your CMS can store them in proper fields and display them consistently across your website.
You can also use schema markup to give search engines and AI tools a clearer idea of what each piece of information actually means.
It may not be the most glamorous bit of website work, but it makes life easier for everyone.
Fees are a very good test
Tuition is probably one of the first things a prospective student will ask an AI assistant to compare.
It's also one of those bits of information that has a habit of appearing in several places.
You might have the current fee on the course page, a separate tuition page, a PDF from last year and an old departmental page that still happens to be live.
A student who spots two different prices might keep digging, but an AI tool may have a much harder time deciding which one is right.
And you really don't want it guessing.
Keeping your fees, scholarships and other important information current, clearly dated and consistent across your website becomes even more important when software is doing the comparing.
An old page isn't necessarily harmless just because nobody on your team has looked at it recently.
Good governance still wins out!
Then there are all the practical questions...
Not every question is about the course itself.
Students want to know how much accommodation costs, whether accessible rooms are available, what support they'll get, whether they can study part time, when applications open, what happens if they need additional help.
That’s a lot of info. And a lot of it tends to live outside the main recruitment journey (on a PDF, on a student services page, or in different parts of the website)>.
If you find it difficult to work out which version or information is current, an AI assistant probably will too.
It’s actually a great excuse to look beyond your main course pages and check the information students are likely to ask about once they start getting serious about applying.
Your accessibility work is helping too
A well-structured, accessible webpage is usually easier for machines to understand as well, because it has proper headings, clear link text, semantic HTML, and frictionless UI.
Of course, accessibility work is there to make your website better for people.
But if you've spent time cleaning up your page structure and making your content easier for screen readers to interpret, you've probably also made life easier for AI tools trying to make sense of the page.
So that's a really useful extra benefit.
Your webpage may not be the only place AI gets the answer
There's another part of this that's worth keeping an eye on.
AI tools increasingly want structured information they can pull directly rather than trying to work everything out from a finished webpage.
You can already see this happening in online shopping.
An AI shopping assistant doesn't necessarily want to read a lovely product description: it wants to know the price, whether the item is in stock, what size it comes in and when it can be delivered.
Higher education isn't exactly the same, but you can see where this could go.
An AI assistant looking at your programmes may want your tuition fee, intake date, course duration or delivery method without having to scrape it from several paragraphs of copy.
That's where APIs and structured feeds start to become more interesting.
Your student-facing webpage still matters. Of course it does.
People want stories, context, photography, student voices and a sense of what studying with you might actually be like.
But the same underlying course information may also need to work somewhere else.
A lot of this comes back to content governance
If you manage a large higher education website, you’ll know how easily inconsistencies creep in.
Different schools, departments and faculties are often responsible for their own content, and over time that can mean content can get stale and inaccurate.
AI just gives those inconsistencies another place to show up.
You probably don’t need a new set of “AI writing rules” for your website.
What you do need is confidence that the information already there is accurate, up to date and consistent wherever it appears.
That comes back to the basics: clear ownership, regular reviews, sensible workflows and one reliable source for important information.
Your CMS can make this much easier
Your CMS is in a pretty good position to help.
Instead of allowing important information to be typed differently into dozens of pages, you can manage it as structured content.
Your CMS can help bring some consistency to the information that appears again and again across your website.
Things like tuition, programme length, study mode, qualification, location and application deadlines can all be managed in a more structured way, rather than being rewritten manually on every page.
That makes updates easier, reduces the chances of different versions appearing in different places, and gives you more flexibility to reuse the same information elsewhere — including through APIs or other feeds.
At Terminalfour, this is the kind of work we've been doing with higher education teams for years: course information, content governance, accessibility and getting one source of content to work across different channels.
AI gives you another reason to get those foundations right.
You don't need to start writing for robots
We'd be very wary of anyone telling higher education teams to start filling their websites with strange "AI-optimised" copy.
Your website still needs to work for people first.
Students still want to know what the course is like, what they'll learn, who they'll meet, and whether they can picture themselves at your university or college.
Keep writing for them.
The extra job is to make sure the facts underneath that experience are clear enough that an AI assistant can understand them too.
Because more and more students may start their university research with a question rather than a click.
And if an AI tool comes looking for the answer on your website, you want to make sure it finds the right one.
If a prospective student asked an AI assistant about your university today, how confident are you that it would get the answer right? Let us know.