For decades, the journey of choosing a university was relatively predictable: general web searches, prospectuses, league tables and perhaps an open day to help seal the decision.
Today, a growing number of prospective students are also consulting AI tools – sometimes at the very beginning of their search – to compare universities, explore courses and make sense of the vast amount of information available online.
This shift is placing a new spotlight on online reputation management for both universities and student accommodation providers.
AI is becoming a new front door to university
In the UK, UCAS research, drawing on a survey of nearly 4,500 prospective applicants and current students, found that almost half had used AI tools to explore their higher education options. Students commonly used them to compare universities, investigate subject choices and check entry requirements.
AI has not yet displaced more established and trusted sources. University websites remain the first port of call for many applicants, while open days and other direct experiences continue to carry considerable weight. Students are also still much more likely to reconsider a university following a poor open-day experience than because of a negative AI-generated response.
Nevertheless, the direction of travel is clear. AI is becoming embedded in the discovery and research stages of the student journey, helping applicants decide which institutions warrant further investigation.
A similar pattern is emerging in the United States. A late-2025 vendor-commissioned survey of more than 5,000 high-school students found that 46% were using AI in their college search, up from 26% earlier that year. Students were using chatbots to identify suitable colleges, compare options and investigate institutions they had not previously considered. Almost one in five said information surfaced through AI had led them to remove a college from consideration.
These findings do not mean that AI has become the definitive source of truth. Students continue to cross-check information through institutional websites, social media, online forums and personal experience. However, the shift is in the role AI plays in assembling and interpreting those sources on their behalf.
The same shift is likely to reshape the accommodation search
It is reasonable to expect similar behaviours to extend to student accommodation. A student who has used AI to shortlist universities, compare courses, and investigate campus life may also use it to compare residences, summarise reviews, or identify potential concerns before visiting a provider’s website.
A 2025 experiment by student-housing marketing agency GRO illustrated how this can work. The agency asked ChatGPT and Google Gemini to recommend the best off-campus apartments for a prospective Louisiana State University student in Baton Rouge.
Both platforms produced detailed shortlists of named properties and, following additional prompts, compared factors such as amenities and prices. The answers drew on information extending beyond property websites, including university housing pages, listing platforms and online discussions.
This was a vendor-led demonstration rather than a study of student behaviour, so it cannot tell us how commonly prospective residents are searching in this way. It does, however, illustrate an important point: an AI-generated shortlist is likely to be assembled from information distributed across many different parts of the internet.
A provider’s own website is therefore only one part of the picture.
Why online reputation is becoming more important
AI-assisted search can compress a lengthy research process into a single response. Instead of opening numerous links and forming a judgement from each one, a prospective resident can ask an AI tool to compare the available evidence and produce a shortlist or summary.
The resulting answer may be influenced by the consistency of property information across different platforms, the volume and sentiment of public reviews, university guidance, media coverage and conversations taking place in forums and social channels.
For student accommodation providers, resident feedback and online reviews can no longer be viewed simply as marketing assets. They form part of the wider body of information that AI tools may retrieve, interpret and use when describing a property or provider.
This also means that conventional search optimisation alone cannot compensate for unresolved resident concerns or consistently negative public discussion. Accurate listings and accessible website content remain important, but so do the experiences residents choose to share.
A strong and consistent online presence cannot guarantee what an AI system will say. It can, however, increase the likelihood that AI-generated answers are based on current, complete and representative information.
In the past, the challenge was to rank well in search results. However, today, the emerging challenge for student accommodation providers is to ensure that the broader online story – across official information, listings, reviews and resident voices – reflects the experience they intend to deliver.
The effect is already measurable
This is not a hypothetical risk for the sector – it is something GSL has been tracking directly. Since January 2026, GSL has been piloting a programme with several major UK PBSA operators, representing well over 100,000 beds, to test whether resident feedback gathered through structured surveys can influence how AI platforms describe a property.
The approach centres on giving residents the opportunity to reflect on the parts of their stay they might not otherwise think to mention in a review – Wi-Fi reliability, lift performance, noise levels – the kind of everyday essentials that only attract comment when something goes wrong. When residents highlighted these as positives, and the resulting reviews reached the platforms that matter most, the pilot began to show corresponding shifts in how AI tools summarised individual properties.
In one case, side-by-side comparisons of an AI chatbot’s response to prospective-resident queries about a UK property, taken in January and again several months later, showed the local neighbourhood move from a listed drawback to a positive, and a previously noted concern about social life disappear from the summary altogether.
It is worth being clear about what this evidence can, and cannot, show. AI platforms are effectively black boxes, so there is no way to prove a direct causal link between an individual review and a specific change in an AI-generated summary. What the pilot does suggest is that the underlying mechanism is real, and that providers are not powerless to influence it – genuine, representative resident feedback, channelled to the places AI tools already draw on, can measurably shift how a property is described over time.
Turning resident insight into a stronger online reputation
The pilot above runs on GSL ResX Studio®, which helps student accommodation providers connect resident experience insight with online reputation management.
The platform brings structured surveys, video and audio feedback, review activity, and public reputation insights into one place, helping accommodation providers identify what residents value, respond to emerging concerns, and strengthen the information available across the channels that prospective students use.
As AI becomes a more prominent part of student discovery, ResX Studio can also help providers monitor and improve the digital signals that may influence how they are represented in tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
Find out more about GSL ResX Studio® and how it can support your resident experience and reputation strategy.
