What Content AI Search Can (and Can't) Surface
Understanding what AI Search can and cannot surface helps you set accurate expectations with students, identify gaps in your content strategy, and make smart decisions about where to invest your content creation time. This article covers everything you need to know about what's searchable.
What AI Search Can Surface
AI Search indexes and retrieves any content that is published natively on your VCC platform. Essentially anything under your "Publish" section, in most cases. This typically includes:
- Blog posts
- Resources
- Events
- Job and internship postings (including integrated content from Handshake, Symplicity, and similar platforms)
- Community pages
- Experiences
- Classes
- Organizations
- People (Alumni Mentors)
- Staff pages and contact information
- Video content (titles and descriptions)
- Outcomes/First Destination Survey (FDS) data — for institutions that have uploaded this data and opted in
What AI Search Cannot Surface
There are a few important limitations to be aware of:
- Full PDF content — AI Search cannot read the contents of uploaded PDF files. It can surface PDFs based on their titles and descriptions, but the text inside the document is not indexed at launch. In the meantime, consider migrating key information from high-value PDFs into native platform content.
- External link content — Similarly, AI Search does not follow external links and index what's on the other side. If you link to an external guide or third-party article, only the link title and description are searchable.
- iframe-embedded content — Content that is embedded in your VCC via an iframe (for example, a third-party widget or embedded external page such as Tableau or PowerBI) is not indexed. AI Search can only index content that lives natively on the VCC platform.
- SSO-protected content for unauthenticated users — If a student is not logged in, they will not see content that is protected behind a login wall. The system is designed to prefer returning no result over surfacing unauthorized content.
- Content from non-career domains — AI Search is scoped specifically to career services content. Topics like admissions, housing, health services, or IT support are out of scope by design.
No Keyword Tagging or SEO Optimization Required
This is good news for your team: AI Search uses semantic retrieval, which means it understands the meaning and context of your content — not just whether specific keywords appear. You do not need to add extra keyword tags, rewrite entire titles for SEO, or restructure your existing content for AI Search to work effectively.
Of course, the more descriptive and content-rich your content titles and descriptions are throughout your platform the better, but rest assured, AI search is really good at surfacing your content.
Simply publishing well-written, complete, descriptive content to your platform is sufficient. The more clearly a piece of content explains its topic and purpose, the more reliably AI Search will surface it for relevant student queries.
Remember: Be sure you are still tagging your content as you always have! All content should have audience tags, content category tags, and any other relevant community tags. Learn more about tagging best practices!
How Quickly Content Updates Appear
You don't have to wait long for new or updated content to become searchable:
- Resources, blog posts, and community pages: typically appear in AI Search within approximately 15 minutes of being published.
- New job postings: timing depends on your integration's sync schedule. If you're using Handshake, for example, new postings will appear based on when that sync runs.
- Existing content: already indexed and available immediately — indexing delays only affect new or recently updated content.
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Pro Tip: If you publish a piece of content and want to verify it's showing up in AI Search, wait about a minute and then try a relevant query. If it doesn't appear right away, give it a few more minutes — brief delays can occur during periods of high activity. |