BrightEdge x Georgetown University

	263% Growth in ranking keywords, from 742 to 2.7K
	769 AI Overview citations earned in the program’s first year
	218% Growth in returning users to the Steers Center website

Georgetown McDonough’s ranking keywords grew from 742 to 2.7K. That is 263 percent growth, earned in under a year, by a team that mapped the unified student journey and built search demand for an entirely new degree program.

About Georgetown McDonough

Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business prepares global business leaders. Its Steers Center for Global Real Assets offers academic and practical training at the intersection of real estate, infrastructure and the energy transition. The center expanded beyond its original real estate focused program and launched a new M.S. in Global Real Assets.

The Challenge Georgetown Brought to BrightEdge

Georgetown’s Steers Center wanted to expand beyond real estate to also cover infrastructure, helping students learn to model complex projects like data centers. That meant two things had to happen at once: launching a brand new degree, the M.S. in Global Real Assets, and rebranding the center itself from Global Real Estate to Global Real Assets.

The new degree was first in its category. Prospective students came from backgrounds like civil engineering, urban planning and public policy, and none of them had searched for this specific degree before, because it did not exist yet. Georgetown’s marketing team had to create the awareness before they could capture any demand at all.

All of this needed to happen fast, in time for the next academic year, while the center’s own name and brand identity were changing underneath the launch.

Georgetown’s Strategy with BrightEdge

Students rarely search with one term in mind. They ask questions, compare programs and eventually search for how to apply, often through AI assistants along the way. BrightEdge gave Georgetown’s team a single view of that behavior, something the team could not piece together channel by channel on its own.

• Map what students actually search, at every stage: using Data Cube X and Instant, the team mapped real questions from broad early searches like “what is sustainable urban planning,” to comparison searches like “Masters in International Real Estate” from students already weighing their next degree program.
• Turn that map into one connected content hub: a central pillar page for the M.S. in Global Real Assets, supported by cluster content across four topics, so a student could move from a broad first question to the specific program page without hitting a dead end.
• Produce that content fast enough to hit the launch date: Content Advisor helped the team draft optimized, structured articles quickly from the mapped keyword clusters, freeing faculty and subject matter experts to focus their time on academic depth instead of first drafts.
• Move the site without losing the rankings already earned: when it came time to publish the new hub on a dedicated subdomain in July 2025, ContentIQ monitored crawlability, site structure and internal linking throughout the move.
• Track whether it was working, in search and in AI: Share of Voice and AI Catalyst gave the team one dashboard to benchmark against peer institutions and watch AI Overview citations grow, instead of checking two separate systems.

The Result for Georgetown

The results followed quickly, and on more than one front at once. Georgetown’s ranking footprint grew from 742 keywords in February 2025, before the migration, to 1.4K by June 2025, and reached 2.7K by January 2026 after the subdomain launch, a 263 percent increase overall. Returning users to the Steers Center website grew 218.56 percent, from 1,444 in 2024 to 4,617 in 2026.

At the same time, the program earned 769 AI Overview citations by January 2026, for a category Georgetown built from the ground up. On the terms that matter most for real assets, Georgetown consistently outranked NYU Stern, Harvard Business School, Michigan Ross and UVA Darden in head to head Page 1 through 3 rankings.

“With BrightEdge, we built a semantic structure that defined the conversation around a brand new category. Seeing our faculty’s insights cited in AI Overviews shows that structured, authoritative content is what modern students, and modern search, respond to.”
- Daisy Johnson, Director, Integrated Marketing and Communications, Georgetown University, McDonough School of Business

How Georgetown Runs the Program Today

With a strong top of funnel content engine now running, Georgetown has shifted its attention to conversion rate optimization. The team is using insights from the same content map it built during the launch to optimize internal links between the informational content on the Steers Center subdomain and the McDonough flagship program page, turning curious readers into prospective student applications.

What This Means for Other Marketers

Solid SEO is the foundation search engines and AI both draw from. Georgetown built this program’s visibility on a strong SEO foundation from the start, and as AI powered search grew, that same structured content translated directly into AI Overview citations. SEO is the foundation, and AEO is the disciplined layer built on top of it.

A brand new category does not wait for search volume to show up first. Map the full journey your audience will take, from a first question to a final decision, and build visibility for all of it, in search and in AI, from day one.