How to get your school or training centre recommended by ChatGPT
A parent choosing a school, or an adult choosing a course, used to read forums for a week. Now a lot of them ask ChatGPT and get three names back. This page shows you the questions they ask, where those answers come from, and the ten things that decide whether you are one of the names.
This is what gets typed: whole sentences, with the problem in them, rather than keywords.
These are the shapes of question families and learners type. Age, level, budget and location, all in one breath.
Of US Google searches now end without anyone clicking through to a website. The answer happened on the results page.
SparkToro, 2026
Of searches show an AI Overview. Your listing is below an answer most people never scroll past.
TechCrunch, July 2026
Of AI Overview citations come from YouTube. Reddit is another 19%. Most of what feeds the answer is not your website.
Ahrefs, across all topics
The engine is reading. Mostly not your website.
Engines answer education questions from a small set of places, and most of them are not your website. Parents write a lot in public, and the engines read all of it.
Registration and accreditation registers
The government or accrediting body list for your country. It settles whether you are real and what you are allowed to teach. If your entry is stale, or the name does not match your site, engines hedge.
Parent forums and Reddit
"Has anyone tried this school" threads are the richest recommendation text on the internet, and around 19% of AI Overview citations come from Reddit across all topics. What parents say about you there carries more weight than your prospectus.
YouTube
The largest single source in the same Ahrefs data, at about 23%. A campus tour shot on a phone, or a teacher explaining how a class runs, is exactly what gets pulled into an answer.
Google reviews
Reviews are readable text, so one that names the programme, the child's level and what changed is a signal. Five stars and "great school" is not.
Course directories and comparison sites
Structured listings with fees, dates and locations. Thin, but predictable, and engines lean on predictable.
Press and rankings
Local news on results day, a mention in a "best schools" piece, a quote from your head in a story about the curriculum. Trusted pages, with your name inside them.
Your own site
It confirms what the other sources said. Fees, dates, who teaches, what happens in week one. Necessary, rarely sufficient.
The 23% and 19% figures are Ahrefs numbers across all topics, not education specifically. We have not seen a public breakdown for education queries and we are not going to invent one. What we can say is that in every education prompt set we have run, most of the citations were not the provider's own website.
Ten fixes that change what the engines say.
Ten fixes, in the order we would do them. Most are a week of admissions time, not a project.
Name programmes the way families ask for them
Age, level, exam board, outcome. "PSLE maths, Primary 5 and 6, small groups" beats "Mathematics Excellence Programme". Keep your name for the brochure.
One page per programme per campus
A single "Our courses" page cannot answer twelve different questions, so split it into one page per programme. Do not list a location you do not actually teach at.
Publish fees, intake dates and class sizes
Cost and "when can we start" are in most questions. A page that says "enquire for fees" loses to one that answers.
Put your registration on the page, in words
The register number, the body, and the programmes it covers, matching the official entry exactly, because an engine treats a matching register entry as the quickest proof that you are real.
Name the teachers and trainers
Qualifications, years, what they actually teach. A named teacher is a stronger entity than "our passionate educators".
Answer the ten questions parents ask before they visit
What is a normal day like, what if my child is behind, what are your results, how do you handle bullying. Write them as questions and answer them straight.
Ask for reviews that say the programme and the outcome
Give parents the sentence: the level their child was at, the programme, what changed. Same for adult learners: the course, the job they got after.
Two minutes of video per programme
A class in progress, a campus walk, a trainer explaining how assessment works. Phone quality is fine, because video is the source type the engines cite more than any other.
Turn up in the forums as a person
Answer the questions in parent groups and on Reddit under your own name, without a pitch. It is slow and it compounds, and it is the source the engines read most.
Date your pages and publish the numbers
A visible "last updated" line, FAQPage markup, and your outcomes with the year: exam results, placement rates, class sizes. Only claim what you can evidence.
How likely is ChatGPT to recommend your school? Score it in two minutes.
Answer ten quick questions about your business and get a score out of 100 straight away. Within 24 hours, I ask ChatGPT three questions your parents and students would type, and email you whether it named you and who it named instead. It is free, and nobody rings you.
If you are not sure of an answer, that is an answer too.
Start free, then pay only for what earns its keep.
The free audit shows you what ChatGPT says today. The paid audit comes with a 90-day plan to change it, and monitoring tells you every month whether it worked.
1. The free basic audit
FreeTen quick questions about your school or training centre, scored out of 100. Within 24 hours, I ask ChatGPT three questions your parents and students would type, and email you whether it named you and who it named instead.
2. The audit and strategy
US$297 onceWe ask 20 to 30 real parent or student questions across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews, several times each. You see who gets named and what the engines read. Then you get the 90-day plan: what to fix, in order, and who does it, written so your admissions or marketing team can run it.
3. Monitoring
US$149/moYour questions, asked again every month (or every week for US$249). One page: how often you were named, which competitor moved, and what to do next, plus an alert if you drop out. Cancel any time.
Start with the free basic audit. It takes two minutes and you pay nothing. I do not build or maintain websites, and I do not sell guaranteed rankings.
Mark Ashworth
Growth Pigeon, Singapore
I have spent 25 years doing marketing in Asia, most of it for businesses that needed customers this quarter. I am not a tool and there is no agency behind me. When you buy an audit for your school or training centre, I am the one reading the answers.
The promise: no jargon. If I send you something you need me to translate, I have done it wrong. And I will never tell you a ranking is guaranteed, because AI answers change run to run and anyone claiming otherwise has not checked twice.
The honest answers.
Will this get my school to the top of ChatGPT?
There is no top. ChatGPT names a few providers and the list moves between runs. What we do is measure how often you get named across a set of real parent and student questions, change what feeds those answers, and measure again. Anyone promising a number one spot in an AI answer is selling something that does not exist.
We are an international school, not a tuition centre. Does this still apply?
Yes, and the fixes are the same shape. The questions are longer and the budget is bigger, so the sources shift a little towards forums, rankings and press, and away from directories. The audit uses your questions, not a generic set.
Is this just SEO with a new name?
It overlaps, but the money goes somewhere different. Classic SEO spends its budget on backlinks. Backlink counts barely correlate with whether an AI names you. What moves is being present and consistent in the places the engines read, which for education is registers, forums, reviews and video more than it is your homepage.
How long before anything changes?
Perplexity picks up changes in about two to four weeks. Gemini takes one to three months. ChatGPT is slower for anything baked into the model, though its browsing mode reacts faster. Expect partial movement in month one, and plan it around your intake dates.
Can we say we are the best, or publish our results?
Publish results you can evidence, with the year. Do not claim outcomes you cannot show. Advertising rules for education differ by country and you should check yours, but nothing here asks you to make a claim, only to state what is true in a place the engines can read.
What does the scorecard give me?
Ten questions about your own school or centre, two minutes, a score out of 100 and the three things to fix first. It costs nothing and nobody calls you. If it puts you in the running, that is a fine answer and it will say so. If not, the audit is the next step, because it asks the engines instead of asking you.
Growth Pigeon helps schools, tuition and enrichment centres, training providers and education businesses get named when parents and students ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for a recommendation. We test the questions real families and learners ask, report which providers the engines name today, and give you the fixes that change it.