#108 - AI Findability: How to Structure Your College’s Website to Answer Questions (Without The FAQ Dump Page)
If you've been feeling the pressure to overhaul your entire web presence for AI search, this episode is your permission slip to take a breath.
Georgy Cohen is a content strategist who has spent her career in and around higher ed — in-house at universities, at agencies, and as an independent consultant. She joined the show to talk about one of the most practical and overlooked problems in higher ed marketing: how to actually structure your website so it answers the questions prospective students are asking — without relying on the sprawling, ungovernable FAQ page that becomes a dumping ground the moment you create it.
Georgy brings a content strategy and information architecture lens to a conversation that usually stays at the surface level of SEO and branding. The result is a genuinely useful framework for thinking about your web content on two levels at once — what the human sees and what the bots are crawling — and why attending to both doesn't have to mean starting from scratch.
In this episode:
Why FAQ pages are well-intentioned but create more problems than they solve — and what to do instead
The difference between the "viewable web" and the "semantic web," and why higher ed is mostly only thinking about one of them
Why clear communication fundamentals will get you most of the way to AI findability — and why panicking won't
How to bridge the gap between subject matter experts (faculty, financial aid staff) and the content strategists who know how to structure information
Why higher ed's reluctance to have a point of view is hurting both their brand and their findability
The role user research should be playing — and why it's underused
Two short books Georgy recommends for anyone who wants to build a foundational understanding of content strategy and information architecture
Resources mentioned:
Everyday Information Architecture by Lisa Maria Marquis:
The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane
About Schema Markup:
Connect with Georgy:
LinkedIn: Georgy Cohen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgy/