TwoTwoSix Digital: Search has shifted and educators need to keep up
In most marketing, and certainly in education, ranking on Google doesn’t quite cut it anymore. For years, if you uploaded a campus tour video or a faculty Q&A, Google essentially had to rely on whatever title and description you manually wrote to understand what was in it. That’s no longer the case. As of early 2026, Google’s multimodal AI systems can actually parse the content of audio and video directly, analysing the depth, style, and substance of what’s being said and shown.
This means a 15-second clip of your financial aid coordinator explaining scholarship deadlines can now surface as a direct answer to a student’s very specific search query. Your video content is now a searchable database. If your videos are muddled, unstructured, or just polished promotional fluff, the AI is likely to deprioritise them in favour of content that’s more genuinely informative. A slick campus reel might actually lose to an authentic, slightly rough student vlog.
Which brings us to our next point…
Google’s ranking systems have become increasingly focused on E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The “Experience” element is the newest and arguably the most interesting for educators. It’s basically a signal that rewards content created by people who have actually lived the thing they’re describing.
Prospective students (especially Gen Z) are already pretty good at sniffing out “institutional spin.” They’re not looking for a polished admissions brochure; they want to hear from a current student about whether the workload is manageable or from an alum about whether their degree opened doors. This kind of content (the real, human stuff) is exactly what the algorithm is now rewarding. Lean into authentic faculty narratives, transparent alumni outcomes, and student-led content, and you’ll have content that your competitors can’t easily copy.
The click is somewhat irrelevant
Do you currently measure success in website traffic? Well, we have some bad news: Around 60% of searches now end without a click. This means the user gets their answer directly from an AI-generated summary and moves on. Organic click-through rates drop significantly when AI Overviews are present.
If your institution is the one cited inside that AI Overview, your click-through rate is actually 35% higher than competitors who are just listed in the standard results. So the goal isn’t to fight the zero-click trend; it’s to be the cited authority within it. That’s a meaningfully different content strategy than what most university marketing teams have been running.
Here’s how we recommend you approach this:
- Traditional SEO is still the foundation (your site architecture, page speed, and keyword relevance still matter)
- On top of that sits Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), which is about structured content that can be easily extracted for snippets and voice answers (FAQ pages, concise program summaries, and clear schema markup)
- Then we have Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), which is less about your website and more about your reputation across the entire web
AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini pull from Reddit threads, journal citations, media coverage, and student reviews when they form an opinion about your institution. If you’re absent from those conversations, you’re effectively invisible to a growing portion of prospective students.
Search is now a living, multimodal ecosystem rather than a keyword checklist, and if you need a little help mastering it, the team at TwoTwoSix Digital is here to offer it. Let’s chat!
0450 532 497
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twotwosixdigital.com.au
