Enrolling Students in the Zero-Click Era: 5 Takeaways

In our July webinar, Halda's Angela Brown sat down with Manaferra co-founder and chief strategy officer Granit Doshlaku to unpack what Google's move to AI search means for enrollment teams, and which channels to lean on when the clicks dry up. The full session is above. Here are five things to take back to your team.

1. Treat zero-click search as an enrollment problem, not an SEO one

Students are searching more than ever and clicking less than ever. Tuition, deadlines, how you compare to the school down the road: Google and AI tools answer all of it before a student ever reaches your site. Pew found more than 60% of Americans read the AI summaries in their search results, and 40% use chatbots to look things up.

That reframes the whole problem. Your funnel was built to earn a click and convert it on your site. When the click never comes, the top of the funnel shrinks. Granit's advice is to bring this to leadership early and reset the KPIs you report, before someone asks why organic traffic is down.

2. Check whether AI recommends you, and whether it has its facts straight

Getting named in an AI answer now carries more weight than a blue link ever did, so the first job is to see what the answer says about you. Granit shared a school that emailed Manaferra in a panic: their application deadline was June 15, but Google's AI overview was telling students it was May 15. A technical issue had blocked Google from crawling the updated page for a few weeks, so the old date stuck. Students saw "past deadline" and moved on.

There are two lessons here. Keep your own pages current and crawlable, because AI reaches for them as the source of truth. And watch the follow-up questions, not just "best MBA near me." Manaferra's new free AI Index shows how often AI recommends your school, who you show up against and which sources it pulls from. For enrollment, ChatGPT and Gemini are the two platforms that matter.

3. The funnel flipped from rank-and-click to recommended-then-converted

The old funnel was simple. You ranked, earned the click and converted on your own site. The new funnel works differently. You get recommended by the sources AI trusts, then capture the student in a channel you own. Granit splits the work into earned and owned: earned is the recommendation, owned is where you close.

More than half of those recommendations live off your site. AI reaches for review sites, rankings and discussion threads on Reddit and Quora, then checks your pages to confirm the details. If your program only makes its case on your own site, you're missing the place where the decision forms.

4. Make your owned channels do the heavy lifting

When search sends fewer students your way, email, SMS and landing pages carry more of the funnel. The numbers back it up. SMS open rates sit around 98%, and students in two-way texting with admissions are 7.5 times more likely to enroll than students who only get one-way blasts. 94% of Gen Z uses email, and 37% say brand emails influence their decisions. Email traffic converts on landing pages at about 14%, close to double what paid search delivers.

One catch: build these experiences to convert. A student who arrives from AI search is usually further along and asking more specific questions, so give them a clear next step and a fast way to get answers. Halda works as the conversion layer that meets them there, pairing a two-way conversation with on-site search and learning from each interaction so the next message is informed by the last.

5. Change what you put on the scoreboard

AI prompts vary from student to student and week to week, so a single monthly rank check won't tell you much. Rank position becomes how often AI recommends you. Organic clicks become owned-channel conversion. The search-results click-through you used to track becomes your share of AI answers against competitors. Backlinks and domain authority still count, but so do the specific sources AI cites.

And if organic traffic is already sliding, you have company. Granit noted schools seeing declines of 35% to 40%, with the trend set to continue. A lot of that was branded traffic anyway, students using Google to find a site they already knew. The read you want now is steady and repeatable across people and weeks, not one number you screenshot once a month.

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Watch the full webinar recording above to hear Angela and Granit walk through the deadline example, a live look at the Manaferra AI Index and the full earned-plus-owned playbook. The recording email also includes a GEO audit template you can use to turn this session into a plan for your own programs.