asu.edu · United States · September 2026
AI assistants already know Arizona State University. Ask any of them about ASU by name and the answer is accurate, favourable and cites asu.edu directly. We tested that across Google AI Overview, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and ASU was cited in every single branded question.
The problem appears the moment a student stops naming the university. When someone describes what they actually want, "a bachelor's degree I can finish online while working full time", or "the strongest nursing programmes", ASU is cited in only 2 of 7 of those conversations. Across all thirty questions we tested, just 8.4 percent of everything the assistants cited belonged to ASU. Reddit was quoted more often than asu.edu, and the University of Arizona was quoted more often than ASU Online.
The site is the reason. ASU has more degree pages than any university we compared, yet the degree site hands Google an unlimited supply of duplicate copies of itself, the highest value commercial pages carry none of the code that tells Google and AI what they offer, and three pages that still bring 13,981 visits a month now open on an error. None of this is a content problem. It is a plumbing problem sitting underneath a genuinely strong estate.
| University | Organic traffic | Ranking pages | Non branded traffic | Position |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arizona State | 1,098,437 | 13,543 | 94,649 | 2nd on traffic, 5th on discovery |
| Florida | 2,943,166 | 29,208 | 174,939 | Largest estate |
| Michigan | 1,181,295 | 25,992 | 864,609 | Leads discovery |
| Ohio State | 1,160,739 | 20,581 | 457,041 | Health content engine |
| Illinois | 671,590 | 19,819 | 272,271 | Extension content engine |
| Northern Arizona | 112,053 | 2,100 | 2,071 | In state rival |
Ahrefs, United States, September 2026. Non branded traffic means visits from searches that do not contain the university name. It is the traffic that comes from people who have not chosen a university yet.
| Question type | What the student is doing | ASU cited | Read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Named questions | Already knows ASU, checking it out | 5 / 5 | Owned |
| Decision questions | Cost, deadlines, entry requirements | 4 / 6 | Strong |
| Evaluation questions | Comparing programmes without naming a school | 5 / 8 | Mixed |
| Discovery questions | Has not chosen a university yet | 2 / 7 | Losing |
| Reputation probes | Checking for problems | 2 / 4 | Mixed |
Across all thirty answers the assistants returned 1,045 sources. Only 88 of them were ASU pages. The most quoted source of all was Reddit.
| Source | Times quoted | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| reddit.com | 54 | Student discussion |
| asu.edu | 36 | ASU |
| usnews.com | 29 | Rankings |
| collegevine.com | 28 | Admissions advice |
| niche.com | 26 | Reviews |
| arizona.edu | 22 | University of Arizona |
| asuonline.asu.edu | 19 | ASU Online |
The line that matters: the in state rival is quoted more often than ASU Online.
Every question we tested. Only 7 of 30 name ASU. If most prompts carried the brand the model would be handed the answer, so a citation on the other 23 means an assistant reached for ASU unprompted.
| # | Question | Type | ASU cited | Which assistants |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| P001 | Is ASU actually a good school or just easy to get into? | Branded | Yes | ai_overview, perplexity, gemini |
| P002 | What do students actually say about going to Arizona State? | Branded | Yes | gemini |
| P003 | Is an ASU Online degree taken seriously by employers? | Branded | Yes | ai_overview, perplexity, gemini |
| P004 | ASU or Northern Arizona University for an in state student, which should I pick? | Branded | Yes | gemini |
| P005 | Arizona State vs Ohio State for an out of state student on cost and value | Branded | Yes | ai_overview, perplexity, gemini |
| P006 | Which universities let you finish a bachelor's degree fully online while working full time? | Discovery | No | none |
| P007 | What are the best public universities in Arizona? | Discovery | Yes | gemini |
| P008 | My daughter wants to study nursing, which universities have the strongest BSN programs? | Discovery | No | none |
| P009 | Which US universities offer the widest choice of online degree programs? | Discovery | Yes | perplexity |
| P010 | Where can I study engineering in the southwest without paying private school tuition? | Discovery | No | none |
| P011 | What are the most affordable online bachelor's degrees for adults going back to school? | Discovery | No | none |
| P012 | Which American universities have the strongest reputation for innovation and research? | Discovery | No | none |
| P013 | Which online MBA programs are properly accredited and still cost under 30,000 dollars? | Evaluation | No | none |
| P014 | I have an associate degree from community college, which universities make transferring credits easiest? | Evaluation | Yes | ai_overview |
| P015 | Which universities offer an online master's in psychology that actually leads to licensure? | Evaluation | Yes | perplexity, gemini, chatgpt |
| P016 | Which large public universities have the best career services and graduate job placement? | Evaluation | No | none |
| P017 | Which online programs let you start several times a year instead of only in the fall? | Evaluation | Yes | perplexity |
| P018 | Which universities have journalism programs with a real working newsroom? | Evaluation | Yes | ai_overview |
| P019 | Which schools offer online computer science degrees that employers genuinely respect? | Evaluation | Yes | ai_overview, chatgpt |
| P020 | With a 3.2 GPA and no SAT score, which big public universities are realistic for me? | Evaluation | No | none |
| P021 | How much does a year at a big public university in Arizona cost for an out of state student? | Decision | Yes | ai_overview, perplexity, chatgpt |
| P022 | What scholarships can an out of state student realistically get at a large public university? | Decision | No | none |
| P023 | What GPA do you need to get into a public university in Arizona? | Decision | Yes | ai_overview, gemini, chatgpt |
| P024 | When are the application deadlines for Arizona public universities for autumn 2027? | Decision | Yes | ai_overview, perplexity, gemini, chatgpt |
| P025 | Is it cheaper to do two years at community college and then transfer to a state university? | Decision | No | none |
| P026 | How much financial aid can I actually get for an online bachelor's degree? | Decision | Yes | gemini |
| P027 | Are huge public universities with 70,000 students worth it, or am I better off somewhere smaller? | Reputation | No | none |
| P028 | Which big public universities get the most complaints about class sizes and student support? | Reputation | No | none |
| P029 | Is Arizona State's high acceptance rate a red flag? | Reputation | Yes | ai_overview, gemini |
| P030 | What do students complain about most at Arizona State? | Reputation | Yes | perplexity, gemini, chatgpt |
Thirty questions written in the voice of a prospective student or a parent, run across Google AI Overview, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity in September 2026. Only seven of the thirty name ASU, so a citation means the assistant reached for ASU on its own.
Whether each type of page a student needs exists, and whether it is built so Google and AI can read it.
| Page type | Exists | Description for search | Code that describes it | Questions and answers | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homepage | ✓ | ✗ | Partial | ✗ | Weak |
| Degree detail | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Strong |
| Degree search and lists | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | Weak |
| ASU Online programme | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | Weak |
| Admissions and apply | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Strong |
| Tuition and cost | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | Partial |
| News and editorial | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | Partial |
| Evergreen topic guides | Partial | Mixed | ✗ | ✗ | Missing as a system |
The pages that are built properly are the ones a student reaches after they already know about ASU. The pages that decide whether they ever hear about ASU, the degree lists, the online programme pages and the topic guides, are the weakest on the estate.
Three things in the plumbing are doing most of the damage. Each is a build task, not a content task.
On the degree site, an address that has never existed opens the normal degree homepage instead of an error, and asks Google to save it. A capital letter is enough to create a new one: degrees.asu.edu/Undergraduate and degrees.asu.edu/ are stored as two pages with the same title. On ASU Online the opposite happens: the error status is correct, but the page still asks Google to save it and claims to be a copy of the ASU Online homepage.
Why it costs money: both faults fill Google with pages that should not exist. The degree site version has no ceiling, splits the strength of the real degree homepage across unlimited copies, and is the reason so many degree pages share one title.
Three addresses still rank in Google and still receive visitors, but now return an error page. The largest, the online bachelors page, still brings 4,530 visits a month and holds 609 search terms.
Why it costs money: 13,981 visits a month click a Google result and land on a broken page. The error page then tells Google to save it and claims it is a copy of the ASU Online homepage, so the problem spreads instead of clearing.
Every page can carry a block of hidden code that spells out what it is. On a degree page that means the award, the level, how long it takes, what it costs and the questions people ask. ASU writes this properly on degree detail pages and on admissions, and it is genuinely well built there.
It is missing from the places that matter most. ASU Online programme pages carry only a generic tag that says this is a web page, which tells Google and AI nothing about the programme itself. News articles carry nothing, which keeps them out of news and AI surfaces they would otherwise qualify for. The explainer library carries nothing, so none of that authority is machine readable.
This is the material an assistant needs to answer a question like what does an ASU nursing degree cost and how long does it take. Where the code exists, the page answers for itself. Where it does not, the assistant guesses or quotes somebody else.
| Template | Monthly visits | Describes itself? |
|---|---|---|
| degrees.asu.edu degree pages | 41,835 | Yes, complete |
| admission.asu.edu | 23,831 | Yes |
| asuonline.asu.edu programmes | 166,002 | No |
| news.asu.edu articles | 32,848 | No |
| askabiologist.asu.edu | 51,531 | No |
Why it costs money: ASU Online is the single largest commercial asset on the estate and gives Google and AI nothing machine readable to work with.
| Page, Lighthouse mobile, same day | Largest Contentful Paint |
|---|---|
| degrees.asu.edu/bachelors | 23.45s |
| www.osu.edu | 20.02s |
| nau.edu | 16.16s |
| admission.asu.edu/apply | 15.67s |
| asuonline.asu.edu/online-degree-programs/ | 12.17s |
| www.ufl.edu | 4.72s |
| www.asu.edu | 3.64s |
Good is under 4 seconds. Only the two homepages clear it, and the competitors are slow too, which makes this a chance to get ahead rather than a crisis. Laboratory measurements, not field data.
ASU publishes more degree pages than anyone in this comparison. The gap is not volume, it is depth on the topics that bring new people in.
Florida earns twice the degree traffic from 41 percent fewer pages. ASU already has the bigger catalogue. The duplicates, the repeated titles and the missing descriptions are what hold the average down.
Every university here runs a library of evergreen guides that has nothing to do with admissions. The difference is scale, and ASU is last.
| University | Their evergreen library | Non branded visits |
|---|---|---|
| Florida | ifas.ufl.edu | 419,934 |
| Michigan | careercenter.umich.edu | 290,974 |
| Ohio State | health.osu.edu | 210,689 |
| Illinois | extension.illinois.edu | 130,781 |
| Arizona State | askabiologist.asu.edu | 49,219 |
| Northern Arizona | No comparable host | 0 |
Florida earns 8.5 times what ASU earns from this kind of content.
ASU actually leads this group on news traffic, at 30,495 non branded visits against Florida's 5,657. That is real, and it is a different thing from the table above.
The difference is which address the content sits on. No competitor puts evergreen guides on its newsroom. They sit on a functional subdomain owned by a school, a service or a centre: careers at Michigan, the health system at Ohio State, the extension service at Illinois and Florida. ASU is the only one of the six whose biggest non branded page happens to sit on its news host, and that page is a single 2020 article carrying 24,527 of the 30,495. So ASU wins the newsroom and loses the library.
ASU runs 273 subdomains. The 85 academic schools and departments earn 58,457 visits a month between them, 5 percent of the estate. Seventeen outreach sites that sell nothing earn nearly three times that.
| University | Top 100 pages on an academic department | Departments earning traffic |
|---|---|---|
| Michigan | 47 of 100 | 27 |
| Florida | 46 of 100 | 19 |
| Ohio State | 37 of 100 | 14 |
| Arizona State | 21 of 100 | 10 |
Of ASU's ten, only the Law school actually sells degrees. The rest are outreach projects. The W. P. Carey School of Business earns 1,791 visits a month and its best search term is its own name.
We checked the live sites rather than assuming why. The business, engineering, journalism, nursing and education schools all publish a News section and nothing else. None has a guides or resources hub. It is a content type problem, not an access problem.
Eight ASU subdomains already hold a real outside audience and publish nothing that leads anywhere. Each could credibly own a whole topic set, not one question.
| Subdomain | Topic set it would own | Topics | Additional traffic / month, realistic | Including harder topics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| asuonline | How to study online, not what to study | 8 | 20,070 | 20,070 |
| academyforjustice + popcenter | Criminal justice and policing | 7 | 18,600 | 18,600 |
| bioenergy | Environment and energy | 6 | 16,380 | 45,180 |
| askabiologist | Biology and life sciences | 10 | 11,950 | 17,050 |
| geoalliance | Geography, GIS and teaching | 7 | 6,890 | 9,790 |
| iho | Anthropology and archaeology | 5 | 4,800 | 4,840 |
| careercatalyst | Bootcamps and career entry | 3 | 4,800 | 4,800 |
| asufidmmuseum | Fashion and design | 3 | 1,250 | 1,250 |
| embryo | Developmental biology | 3 | 580 | 27,580 |
| All nine | 52 topics, 105,270 searches | 52 | 85,320 | 149,160 |
An additional 85,320 visits a month is the realistic ceiling, meaning topics at difficulty 30 or lower that ASU can win with a good page and no link building. That is on top of what these subdomains already earn. The 149,160 figure includes renewable energy, carbon footprint and stem cell research at difficulty 57 to 76, which are a two year project rather than a year one plan.
So nobody is sold a number that cannot happen, we dropped any topic where Ahrefs traffic potential exceeded fifty times the query volume. Two examples of what that removes:
| Excluded topic | Query volume | Reported potential | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| can you get financial aid for online college | 150 | 3,340,000 | 22,267x |
| what is a transfer credit | 50 | 11,000 | 220x |
In both cases the page ranking first is a very large hub earning from thousands of unrelated terms, so the figure says nothing about what a new ASU page would earn. Every number in this report has passed that test.
The best basket is not the biggest. academyforjustice and popcenter together are worth 18,600 monthly visits and every topic in that set is difficulty 2 or lower. That is where to start.
Who owns which question matters. ASU Online owns how to study: is an online degree worth it, asynchronous versus synchronous. The school that sells the degree owns what to study: what is kinesiology, what does a social worker do. Putting subject questions on a central marketing host wastes the school's authority and buries the route to the degree.
Questions people ask while deciding what to study. The right hand column is what the topic is worth if ASU owns it, not what the single question is worth, because nobody searches a question only one way.
| Question | Searches for that query | Difficulty | Additional traffic / month if ASU owns the topic |
|---|---|---|---|
| what can you do with a psychology degree | 7,500 | 2 | 13,000 |
| how to become a nurse practitioner | 6,000 | 20 | 11,000 |
| what is kinesiology | 13,000 | 9 | 10,000 |
| what can you do with a criminal justice degree | 3,200 | 1 | 9,100 |
| what does a social worker do | 4,500 | 1 | 7,700 |
| what is environmental science | 8,900 | 4 | 7,400 |
| what is public health | 8,100 | 0 | 4,800 |
| what can you do with an anthropology degree | 800 | 3 | 3,400 |
| what can you do with a biology degree | 3,200 | 1 | 3,200 |
| All 20 topics, excluding data science | 67,720 | most under 10 | 85,800 |
If any of these look small, read the last column, not the first. Nobody searches a question one way. The page that wins "what can you do with an anthropology degree" earns 3,400 visits from a query of only 800, which is 4.2 times over. Criminal justice is 3,200 against 9,100. Together these nineteen topics are worth about 85,800 visits a month, roughly half of what the entire ASU Online estate earns today.
Some are worth owning even with few clicks. "What is forensic psychology" has 6,100 searches but the top page earns only 600, because Google answers it on the page. That demand has not disappeared, it has moved into the answer box and into AI assistants, and being the source quoted there is exactly what this report measures.
The subject question demand and the dormant subdomain baskets describe the same demand from two angles. One is organised by degree subject and answers who at ASU should sign the article. The other is organised by existing subdomain and answers which property already has an audience going to waste.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Subject question demand, realistic | 80,500 |
| Dormant subdomain baskets, realistic | 85,320 |
| Naive sum, do not use | 165,820 |
| Deduplicated union, the only total to quote | 138,020 |
They share six topics worth 27,800 a month. The fix is operational, not arithmetic: publish each of those six once, on the school that sells the degree, and link to it from the outreach subdomain that already has the audience. You do not build the page twice.
We tested 20 of these subject questions against every asu.edu subdomain. ASU ranks for three, and all three sit on the same host.
| Question | ASU position | Page that ranks |
|---|---|---|
| what can you do with a geography degree | 9 | asuonline.asu.edu/newsroom/online-learning-tips/ |
| what can you do with an english degree | 18 | asuonline.asu.edu/newsroom/online-learning-tips/ |
| what can you do with a criminology degree | 22 | asuonline.asu.edu/online-learning-tips |
For the other seventeen, including what is kinesiology, what is public health and what does a social worker do, no ASU page ranks at all. Three pages were written, one reached ninth in the country, and nobody built the rest. None of the three sits on the school that sells the degree. This is not starting from zero, it is finishing something ASU began.
Be visible on the question, then link to the degree. One page per question, published on the school that sells it. Every destination below is a real ASU degree page that already exists.
| Question | Searches / difficulty | School that publishes it | Degree page it links to |
|---|---|---|---|
| what is kinesiology | 13,000 / 9 | College of Health Solutions | /bachelors/major/ASU00/NUKINBS/kinesiology |
| what is public health | 8,100 / 0 | College of Health Solutions | /bachelors/major/ASU00/NHPBHBS/public-health |
| what can you do with a psychology degree | 7,500 / 2 | Department of Psychology | /bachelors/major/ASU00/LAPGSBS/psychology |
| what is forensic psychology | 6,100 / 5 | Department of Psychology | asuonline master-science-forensic-psychology |
| what does a social worker do | 4,500 / 1 | School of Social Work | /bachelors/major/ASU00/PPSWUSWU/social-work |
| what is electrical engineering | 3,500 / 3 | Fulton Schools of Engineering | /bachelors/major/ASU00/ESEEEBSE/electrical-engineering |
| is nursing a good career | 1,000 / 0 | Edson College of Nursing | /bachelors/major/ASU00/NUNURDBSN/nursing |
Start with the nine questions at difficulty 9 or lower, together 47,900 searches a month. Publish on the school, not a central blog, because the school is the credible author and owns the conversion. One link per page to the exact degree page. Measure on applications started from the degree page, not visits to the question page.
ASU already half owns one: askabiologist.asu.edu earns 51,531 visits a month and is already shaped like a proper topic library. It is written for school science and links to no degree. Pointing it at the biology degrees is the cheapest large win in this report.
Splitting each university's traffic into searches that contain the university name and searches that do not.
| University | Total | Searched by name | Did not name them | Share by name |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arizona State | 1,098,437 | 1,003,788 | 94,649 | 91% |
| Northern Arizona | 112,053 | 109,982 | 2,071 | 98% |
| Florida | 2,943,166 | 2,768,227 | 174,939 | 94% |
| Ohio State | 1,160,739 | 703,698 | 457,041 | 61% |
| Illinois | 671,590 | 399,319 | 272,271 | 59% |
| Michigan | 1,181,295 | 316,686 | 864,609 | 27% |
ASU leads this group on searches that do not name a university in every recruitment category: degree discovery, online degrees, admissions and news. So why is it fifth overall?
| University | Did not name them | From recruitment pages | From everything else |
|---|---|---|---|
| Michigan | 864,609 | 2,114 | 862,495 |
| Ohio State | 457,041 | 17,884 | 439,157 |
| Illinois | 272,271 | 5,433 | 266,838 |
| Florida | 174,939 | 35,604 | 139,335 |
| Arizona State | 94,649 | 78,816 | 15,833 |
83 percent of ASU's non branded traffic comes from recruitment pages. For Michigan the figure is 0.2 percent. The entire gap is the last column, and it sits outside the recruitment estate altogether. ASU is not losing in the funnel. It is missing a content engine beside it.
Bachelor degrees earn 65,552 visits a month across the on campus and online catalogues. Master and doctorate earn 50,355 between them. The problem is that they share a single folder, degrees.asu.edu/masters-phd and asuonline.asu.edu/online-degree-programs/graduate/, so the two cannot be told apart in any report and cannot be marketed separately, even though someone choosing a master is at a completely different point from someone choosing a doctorate. Ohio State and Michigan each run a dedicated graduate admissions site, which is how they measure postgraduate recruitment on its own.
The branded split uses Ahrefs' own intent classification on each domain's highest traffic search terms, applied identically to all six universities. It under counts long tails for everyone, and slightly more so for ASU, so treat the ASU figure as a floor.
Two tracks run in parallel. The technical track stops the leaks. The content track fills the gap mapped in section 03. Neither waits for the other.
Section 03 found 52 topics across nine subdomains that ASU has no page for. This is the build order, sequenced by difficulty first and value second, so the earliest work is also the most certain.
| Phase | Window | What gets built | Articles | Add traffic / month | Running total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 to 60 days | Revise the three pages that already rank. No new articles. | 3 revisions | unlocks existing | 0 |
| 2 | 60 to 150 days | Criminal justice basket, then ASU Online study questions | 15 new | 38,670 | 38,670 |
| 3 | 150 to 270 days | Biology basket, then the school published subject questions | 22 new | 64,650 | 103,320 |
| 4 | 270 days onward | Environment, geography, anthropology, bootcamps, fashion, embryo | 24 new | 34,700 | 138,020 |
| TOTAL | about 12 months | 3 revisions + 61 new | 138,020 |
Roughly five articles a month over a year. It is a content calendar, not a campaign. Phase 2 is first because every criminal justice topic is difficulty 2 or lower, and because ASU Online has already proved the format works with one page at ninth.
The plan asks schools to publish, and in a 273 subdomain estate the schools may not report to marketing. That is the most likely reason this stalls, so decide it before phase 2 rather than during it.
| Score | Today | After the technical track | After the content track |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site Readiness | 57 | 72 | 79 |
| AI Visibility | 62 | 66 | 74 |
| Combined | 60 | 69 | 77 |
Projected, not guaranteed. The technical movement comes from work already specified that needs no new content. The content track is where the discovery score moves, because it is the only work that changes what a student finds before they know the name.
This is a third party analysis. Everything in it comes from Ahrefs, from fetching ASU pages directly, and from running 30 prompts through four AI assistants. With no client access, four things are deliberately out of scope and would be the first inputs to a full engagement.
| Not covered | Why | What it would need |
|---|---|---|
| Applications and enrolment | No CRM or admissions data | Slate or equivalent, plus the value ASU assigns to an enrolled student |
| Actual search performance | No Search Console access | GSC property access for asu.edu and the main subdomains |
| On site behaviour and conversion | No analytics access | GA4, to connect a question page to a started application |
| International demand | Every figure here is United States only | A second market pass, since international is usually the highest value cohort |
Nothing in this report depends on those four. They would turn traffic estimates into application and revenue forecasts, which is the natural first step of a full engagement.
Novastacks builds agentic marketing systems for organisations that are already known and are not yet found. We start with the leaks, then the engine.
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