iFactory

Texas community colleges are quietly becoming the national model.

Outcomes-based funding. Landmark AI programs. Some of the fastest dual-credit growth in the country. The energy across these 50 college districts was impossible to miss at Texas Association of Community College Marketers this year, and the theme said it all: Marketing in Motion.

iFactory was proud to sponsor and take the stage. Our own Beth Carron joined David White of San Jacinto College to present "The 1,000,000-Mile Website," making the case that strategy, smart design, and routine maintenance beat the redesign cycle every time. Keep the website running strong, and put the savings back into reaching students.

But the real draw of TACCM is the people. Marketers who share what's working and root for each other's institutions. It is rare and feels really special. And Texas has it.

Thank you, TACCM. See you next year.

iFactory is proud to be a Slate Silver Preferred Partner through Technolutions.

Slate CRM is the leading admissions CRM in higher education, supporting enrollment, student success, and advancement efforts at more than 2,000 colleges and universities. As a vetted and approved Slate Preferred Partner, iFactory provides website-to-CRM integrations and communication flow services that help institutions get more value from their Slate investment.

For colleges and universities using Slate, this partnership means working with a higher education web development team that understands how websites, enrollment marketing, and CRM systems must work together to support prospective students and families throughout their journey. For more than 30 years, iFactory has been building higher education websites that connect digital experiences to measurable enrollment outcomes. Institutions such as Empire State University have seen a 3x increase in RFI form submissions and a 41% year-over-year increase in graduate student enrollment after launching a new Slate-integrated website. San Jacinto College achieved a 54% increase in click-through rates. These results come from treating the website, enrollment marketing strategy, and CRM as an integrated ecosystem rather than separate tools.

Joining the Slate Preferred Partner Program formalizes our commitment to the Slate community and to the institutions that rely on Slate CRM as the foundation of their enrollment operations. We look forward to collaborating with Technolutions, fellow Slate partners, and the admissions and marketing teams working to create more connected, effective digital experiences. https://bit.ly/4fpcpLg

Hey fellow Texas higher education marketing individuals attending the Texas Association of Community College Marketers conference June 8–10! If your institution's marketing website were a car, would you trust it to make a 1,000,000-mile road trip? 🚗

Join iFactory's Director of Higher Education, Beth Carron, and David White, Manager of Web Analytics and Optimization at San Jacinto College and Texas Association of Community College Marketers Southeast Regional Board Director, for "The 1,000,000-Mile Website," a session focused on building and maintaining higher education websites designed for long-term success.

They'll discuss the role of strategy, smart design, governance, and continuous improvement in creating digital experiences that support enrollment, engagement, and institutional goals year after year.

If you're attending , we'd love to connect and continue the conversation. Learn more: https://bit.ly/4u7dZVE

Google's May 2026 messaging to web teams went three directions in one week.

1. The Search Central team published an optimization guide saying generative AI search is still just SEO.

2. The I/O team announced the biggest changes to Search in 25 years: information agents that run in the background, generative UI that builds custom comparison dashboards on the fly, and AI Mode now serving one billion monthly users.

3. A new core update began reshuffling organic rankings across the web through early June.

For higher ed marketing teams, the confusing headline framing matters less than what's underneath it. What is still crystal clear is that authenticity is the one quality AI Mode cannot manufacture. AI Mode is already building comparison dashboards from federal data sources. Tuition, graduation rates, median earnings are commodity now, and can be pulled directly without ever visiting an institutional website. Those numbers are the price of admission, not the position.

AI Mode cannot manufacture what makes your institution actually distinctive. Your teaching philosophy. Your culture. The way your faculty talks about her research. The reflection your junior wrote about her semester abroad. The alumni story that includes the surprising failure as well as the eventual win.

Princeton's seminal GEO research found that direct quotations from credible sources, statistics with attribution, and inline citations lift AI citation rates by 27 to 41 percent.

The institutions that show up in AI search answers will be the ones whose websites tell distinctive, specific, citable stories.
Read more of our insights about these updates on our blog: https://bit.ly/4nVtMpp

A high schooler asks ChatGPT about your school's transfer credit policies. The answer pulls from four different pages on your .edu: admissions, the registrar, an academic department, and an old PDF buried in financial aid. Do they all even say the same thing?

That student doesn't know your org chart. They don't know which office "owns" the answer. They just know they got a confusing or incorrect response from AI search, and 18% of them will quietly remove you from their list because of it.

Your site was probably organized around how your institution is structured. AI search is organized around how prospective students actually ask questions. Those two things are no longer aligned, and the gap is starting to show up in your funnel.

We're offering free customized AI Readiness Audits for higher ed institutions. You'll see exactly how AI search tools currently find, interpret, and represent your .edu, plus where the contradictions and gaps are pulling you out of consideration.

Request yours: https://bit.ly/42JP7Iz

We hired Brittany Pearce as a Digital Strategist this year. Before iFactory, she ran recruitment at Colorado State University, did strategic planning at Winthrop University, and spent three years researching student access at Ithaka S+R.

She has actually been the person sitting on the other end of the website. The one watching the inquiry-to-application steps falter or the acceptance to enrollment quietly fail. And the one tasked with fixing it.

What she's chewing on now: how stealth applications are quietly rewriting the enrollment funnel, and what that means for every page on a college website. Read more about Brittany on our blog. https://bit.ly/4dbGnRB

A few years ago, SEO felt like a settled discipline.

We knew the playbook. Clean architecture, smart content, earned links. Higher ed teams who put in the work eventually saw the rankings climb. Now we are watching prospective students turn to ChatGPT and Perplexity before they ever opened Google. Seeing AI Overviews answer questions our clients used to win clicks for. Realizing the institutions getting named in those AI answers weren't always the ones ranking highest.

It would be easy to read this as SEO dying, or to dismiss Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) as the next buzzword cycle. We don't think either is right. GEO is a new layer that sits on top of solid SEO foundations. The institutions doing both well are the ones whose names show up when a prospective student asks AI for program recommendations. The ones picking sides are losing ground in different directions depending on which side they pick.

We’ve spent the past few weeks writing up what we've learned about how SEO and GEO actually compare for higher ed: what's the same, what's genuinely different, and where to focus optimization work over the next two quarters.

Read our latest post. https://bit.ly/4f62FW2

18% of high school students have removed a college from consideration based on what AI tools told them. Your website isn’t just “a website.” It’s your hardest-working asset. Always on, always visible, and expected to serve everyone at once: prospective students, current students, faculty, parents, donors, alumni.

No brochure. No campaign. No open house comes close.

That’s why a redesign isn’t just a tech upgrade or a fresh coat of paint. It’s a reality check. A moment to see your institution the way a prospective student actually does and to confront the gap between how your school is organized vs. how students search, explore, and decide. And now with AI shaping those decisions? That gap matters more than ever.

We break it all down in our latest blog. https://bit.ly/422t7Z9

Traditional SEO got students to a page of blue links.

AI Search Optimization (AISEO) gets your institution into the answer itself.
AISEO is reshaping how higher ed institutions need to think about content, structure, and authority online.

Our latest piece breaks down:
→ How AI search actually works (and why it's different from traditional SEO)
→ What "showing up in the answer" requires from your content
→ The role of schema, entity clarity, and E-E-A-T signals
→ Practical steps your team can take now
If your prospective students are asking AI about your programs, this is the playbook for making sure your institution is part of the conversation.
Read it here: https://bit.ly/4vV5jUG

Most Drupal vs. WordPress comparisons miss the point.

After two decades of building on both platforms for universities, academic medical centers, and nonprofits, we've stopped believing the feature-by-feature debate helps anyone make a better decision. Both platforms are enterprise-ready. Both can handle federated multisite, complex integrations, SOC 2-grade security, and the governance demands of institutions with thousands of pages and dozens of editors.
If they're both that capable, the interesting question isn't which one is better. It's which one fits the organization you already are. Our new piece walks digital leaders through the six factors to decide a CMS selection.

Choosing a CMS is mostly an exercise in knowing your own organization. The institutions that choose well are the ones that treat it that way.
Read the full piece. https://bit.ly/4ezDAT9