If you’ve ever asked ChatGPT to recommend the best MBA programmes for entrepreneurship, the leading European business schools for sustainability, or which schools produce the most influential alumni, you’ve already seen how the future of discovering different brands is changing. This isn’t just a passing trend - it’s a shift in how prospective students, recruiters, and corporate partners find and assess institutions.
A recent Adobe study found that seventy-seven per cent of US workers have used AI tools like ChatGPT as a search engine. For business schools, this means the traditional path to discovery through rankings, paid search, and carefully optimised websites is no longer the only gateway. Increasingly, people are turning to AI for answers – and, unlike Google, you can’t buy your way to the top.
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT don’t operate in the same way as a search engine – and they certainly aren’t looking for the most recent sponsored posts. They are trained on vast collections of text drawn from publicly available, high-authority sources - academic articles, reputable news outlets, respected industry publications, and long-standing research databases.
The model builds patterns of association between topics and institutions based on the material it has “read.” If your school’s faculty, research, and programmes are consistently mentioned in credible media and academic contexts, the AI recognises you as relevant and trustworthy. If you aren’t present in those sources, you might as well be invisible.
For years, business schools have often relied on targeted advertising to reach prospective students — from Google Ads campaigns to social media promotions of alumni success stories. These methods still have value for immediate lead generation, but they do nothing to improve your visibility within the AI systems people are now using to make decisions.
Paid ads and sponsored posts rarely make it into the datasets on which LLMs are trained, meaning they leave no lasting imprint on how the AI sees you. When someone asks ChatGPT for “the best MBAs for career switchers” six months from now, it won’t remember your ad spend. It will remember your media coverage, research citations, and faculty interviews.
Public relations is uniquely positioned to fill that gap. Earned coverage in outlets like the Financial Times, The Economist, or Harvard Business Review not only reaches potential applicants but also becomes part of the informational landscape that LLMs absorb.
When your professors are quoted on topics like digital transformation, leadership, or sustainability, those associations stick - and the AI begins to link your school to those subject areas. Over time, repeated appearances across credible sources strengthen those links, increasing the likelihood that your institution will be named in response to relevant queries.
In many ways, PR is becoming the new SEO. Just as schools once sought to rank highly on Google by optimising for keywords and backlinks, the new challenge is to “rank” in AI-generated recommendations by ensuring your brand is embedded in the sources the AI trusts most.
The business education sector is in a strong position to take advantage of this shift, because it naturally produces the kind of content LLMs consume: thought leadership articles, research findings, case studies, and expert commentary. But that content needs to be placed where it will have the most long-term impact - in public, reputable sources likely to be included in a model’s training data.
It’s not enough for your latest research to sit behind a paywall or be announced only on your own channels. It has to be part of the wider conversation, reported and referenced by trusted media. This is the difference between temporary attention and lasting presence. Advertising can generate awareness in the moment, but it vanishes once the spend stops. PR creates a record - and in the AI era, it’s that record that the machines (and the people using them) will rely on.
As AI becomes a default research tool, a growing number of prospective students will be compiling their MBA shortlists based on AI-assisted queries. Schools that have invested in PR now will be far more likely to appear in those results, regardless of marketing budget.
The real question is simple: when the next generation of MBA candidates asks an AI which schools they should consider, will it know your name? If not, the time to act is now - because in this new landscape, you can’t pay to be remembered. You have to earn it.
If you would like your business school to appear in more trusted, credible news outlets through a dedicated, strategic public relations campaign, get in touch with us here at BlueSky Education.
Peter achieves prominence for clients across a breadth and depth of significant publications, from trade specific media like International Finance Magazine and QS TopMBA, to national and international goliaths such as Handelsblatt, Le Monde, US News and World Report, and the Financial Times. He also writes under his own name for key publications such as HRZone, Medium and Data Driven Investor.