On the website of the EMBA program at Fudan University’s International School of Finance (FISF), years of content has accumulated: curriculum, faculty perspectives, admissions brochures, event coverage, alumni stories. In the past, most of it was published first on WeChat official accounts, and many links on the website simply redirected there. Today, a growing number of applicants start not with a search engine but by asking AI directly — and what AI can read largely determines what applicants see of the FISF EMBA. How to keep the website as the program’s first source of information in the AI era has become a new task for admissions.
Challenge
The first problem was being unreadable. Many links on the website pointed to WeChat official accounts, and for large language models those accounts are a wall — content that cannot be fetched cannot be cited, so years of quality articles built up by the program sat collectively absent from AI’s answers.
Looking deeper, the problems stacked up: the same article lived at multiple URLs, and duplicate pages left AI unable to tell which one was authoritative; on some core pages the information lived entirely in more than a dozen long images with almost no body text, so all AI could catch were navigation words; the sitemap still contained over twenty test pages; and nearly every page title carried the same long suffix, with one shared description across the site — every page looked alike to AI, which could not tell the course pages from the admissions pages.
Solution
Cloud Coach provides GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) services for the FISF EMBA website. Along the path of making the site readable, understandable, and trustworthy to AI, it ran a systematic cleanup:
Making content accessible. Articles from the WeChat official account were copied one by one onto subpages of the website, with image-based content transcribed into text; links pointing to the official account were replaced with the site’s own subpage URLs, and those subpages were added to the sitemap — dozens of articles landed on the website, and AI could read them in full for the first time.
Making content clean. Duplicate URLs were cleaned up: duplicate pages were taken offline or given 301 permanent redirects to the retained page, and removed from the sitemap; test pages, empty pages, and informal paths were deleted from the site altogether, leaving no noise in the index.
Making content understandable. Core pages whose information lived inside long images were given real body text; a robots.txt was added pointing to the sitemap location, and the sitemap was submitted in Google Search Console; core pages — home, program overview, curriculum, admissions essentials, FAQ, contact, and others — each received their own title and description. Every page had its own topic for the first time.
Outcome
The change landed on the content itself: over twenty test pages taken offline, forty-plus duplicate URLs cleaned up, dozens of WeChat articles now readable in full on the website, and ten core pages carrying dedicated titles and descriptions. The site moved from readable by people to readable by AI — when applicants ask AI about FISF EMBA courses, program length, or application requirements, the basis of AI’s answers is now the website’s own content. Search engines benefit the same way: what gets indexed are clean, official pages, and in Google Search Console every URL the sitemap points to has a clear provenance.
In the past, what applicants knew about the program came largely from forwarded WeChat articles and outdated secondhand information, and asking AI often returned inaccurate answers. After this round of GEO optimization, asking AI about FISF EMBA courses or application requirements returns answers that are accurate and complete, and the source is our own website. The process itself also left us reassured — Cloud Coach delivered an itemized list of what was done and the status of each item, all clear at a glance; you do not need to understand the technology to watch the website learn to ‘speak’ to AI, bit by bit.
Liu Jing, Admissions Manager of the FISF EMBA Program, International School of Finance, Fudan University
The source of admissions information has not changed: course introductions remain, faculty perspectives remain, and so do the admissions brochures. What changed is how that content reaches applicants — when every article on the website can be read by AI and every page has its own topic, the site shifts from being browsed by people to being cited by AI.
