As students increasingly rely on AI-supported tools to research colleges, institutions are shifting from click-through marketing to “answer-engine optimization,” aiming to influence whether and how colleges appear in chatbot-generated summaries. Reporting highlights that nearly half of high schoolers surveyed use AI tools to research colleges, creating a visibility risk for schools that do not adapt their online content. Examples cited include Belmont University seeing a more than sixfold spike in AI-sourced traffic after content changes, and Occidental College reporting a 96% jump in AI-driven actions on core enrollment pages and increased AI citations for certain questions. Marketing and enrollment leaders say the strategy is not about gaming algorithms, but about making official pages easier for AI systems to parse and cite accurately—an emerging operational requirement for enrollment growth.