What families ask AI
about online school.

The brand

Sophia High School offers premium online schooling. The buyer journey is heavy on research: parents and students compare options across forums, reviews, and increasingly AI assistants before they ever fill out a form. Education is a high-trust, comparison-heavy category, and AI assistants now compress that comparison into a few sentences.

The challenge

When a family asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for online-school recommendations, the answer typically narrows to two or three named brands. Sophia wanted continuous visibility into which prompts were being asked, which competitors were being recommended, and where to focus content and technical work to move those answers.

How we ran it

Aiso engagements follow a structured three-phase plan (research, actions, reporting). The Sophia engagement covered all three phases and was extended into a renewal period.

1. Phase 1 · Research

   • Onboarding: products, target families, and student personas mapped.
   • Key prompts: the real questions families ask AI assistants when researching online schooling, with intent classification (TOFU/MOFU/BOFU).

2. Phase 2 · Actions

   • Tech stack review of the existing site.
   • llms.txt file with implementation guidelines.
   • Crawlability report covering which pages were retrievable by AI assistants.
   • Schema markup audit and per-page JSON-LD snippets.
   • Third-party source analysis: which forums, education sites, and reviews drive AI mentions for online schooling.
   • Editorial calendar with 18+ topics tracked through draft, review, and publish, mapped to funnel stage. Sample drafts: factory-model schooling, online-school friendships, screen-time research, signs a child is outgrowing traditional school.

3. Phase 3 · Reporting

   • KPI targets and brand-voice measurement set up.
   • Bottom-of-funnel attribution: AI-assisted clicks and conversions modeled in Google Analytics.
   • Top-of-funnel impressions: a live Looker Studio bot-tracker dashboard pulling from server logs, with weekly automated updates.
   • Weekly recap mailers covering what shipped, next steps, and client action items.

Where it stands

The engagement is ongoing. Sophia signed an extension after the initial 7-phase plan completed, and the team operates the bot tracker and editorial calendar on a recurring cadence. For more on the underlying data, see our methodology page.