Brand + Topic Focused Scorecards
Best among the nine schools – and first in the answers AI gives.
Duke University School of Nursing (DUSON) wanted to know how it stood against eight peer nursing schools, and what prospective students were weighing when they chose a program. Two studies answered both questions: a Brand Presence Scorecard benchmarking DUSON against its competitive set, and a Topic Focused Scorecard on the differentiators driving nursing school decisions. Each paired a year of conversational data with an Answer Engine Optimization visibility analysis.
Two scorecards, one picture – where DUSON stands today, and which conversations decide where prospective students go.
Two questions. One competitive set.
Duke University School of Nursing needed an objective read on two related questions. First, how its brand was performing against the eight nursing schools it competes with for students, faculty and research standing. Second, what prospective students actually weigh when they compare programs, which is a conversation that happens largely outside any school’s own channels.
Both questions had become harder to answer. Prospective students increasingly begin on TikTok, YouTube and Reddit rather than a search engine, and a growing share of the comparison happens inside AI-generated answers that no school controls. DUSON needed a benchmark that covered human conversation and machine answers together.
Two scorecards. Five KPIs. All major answer engines.
We ran two studies, each pairing twelve months of open-web conversational data with an Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) visibility analysis across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
Brand Presence Scorecard
DUSON benchmarked against eight peer nursing schools on five KPIs, each ranked and scored on the same nine-point scale.
Topic Focused Scorecard
58.7K mentions on the differentiators prospective students weigh when choosing a nursing program, and which schools own them.
The AEO layer measured how often DUSON appeared in AI-generated answers, which sources those answers cited, and how its visibility compared with competing schools, prompt by prompt.
First in the conversation. First in the answers.
DUSON finished first overall in the brand presence scorecard, carried by the highest positive sentiment and the lowest negative sentiment in the set. Student and alumni testimonials, particularly on Reddit, drove that result, and video carried reach further than volume did: DUSON ranked near the bottom on mention count but second on reach amplification, largely on the strength of long-form YouTube and short-form creator content.
In AI answers the margin was wider. DUSON held 84% share of voice and 32.7% overall AI visibility, more than thirteen times its closest competitor, and ranked first on every engine tested. More than 90% of AI-generated mentions were positive. Reddit alone accounted for more than 31% of all citations referencing the school.
The topic study showed where the ground is still open. Across the differentiators prospective students actually discuss, affordability, proximity and post-graduate success, DUSON led AI visibility at 27% but by a narrow margin over Hopkins and Penn at 24% each. It also identified the questions (prompts) where DUSON does not appear at all – each a specific, addressable content gap. DUSON will repeat both analyses as periodic checkpoints, tracking how its brand presence and AI visibility move over time and measuring the effect of the content and communications work that follows.