Why regional universities are losing out to the Russell Group in AI search
According to Iff Digital’s GEO Education Index, when it comes to employability-based searches, regionally focused universities, even those with strong employability offers, are losing out to Russell Group institutions.
Regional institutions receive fewer citations; some don’t even turn up in answers at all.
To be clear, this isn’t because they have worse graduate outcomes or lack a good story to tell, it's because AI answers (largely) prioritise third-party content.
And the Russell Group has a lot of that:
Global rankings
High volume of student forum conversation
Research cited by many news publications and outlets
For regionally focused institutions, there’s no easy way to beat these institutions’ visibility.
However, you can win on sentiment (what the answers say.)
Yes, a good way to influence AI sentiment is to generate conversation on sites like Reddit and The Student Room.
But one of the more underrated channels is LinkedIn:
According to a study by Semrush, between January and February this year, LinkedIn was the second-most-cited domain in both ChatGPT and Google AI Mode.
The content cited most often (over 70% of the time) was text-based posts up to 300 words.
Articles being cited were up to 2,000 words.
Long-form, text-based content.
Listen to the words: Large language model.
Give them something good to read.
They’ll return the sentiment.
