University websites on SitecoreAI: programmes, admissions and AI search

8 September 2026
Omnia Hassan

A prospective student in Riyadh, Cairo or Lagos may now compare universities by asking an AI assistant what a programme costs, what it requires and when applications close. The answer quotes whatever it finds: a programme page copied from last year’s catalogue, a faculty microsite nobody updates, a PDF prospectus, or an Arabic page that says something different from the English one. Admissions teams then spend the cycle correcting it.

University websites are hard because many people publish to them, for many audiences, in two languages. SitecoreAI, which Sitecore launched in November 2025 as the evolution of XM Cloud, gives you the structure to fix that. This guide covers programme finders, admissions content by audience, events, governance across faculties, and being cited by AI search engines.

A programme finder fed from the curriculum system

Programme pages go stale when they are copied by hand. Make the curriculum system, or the SIS where it holds the catalogue, the master for each programme’s code, level, faculty, duration, credits, campus, mode, language of instruction and intakes, and import those records into SitecoreAI as content items on a schedule. Faculties then write what a catalogue cannot: why study here, careers, and the people behind the programme.

Two field settings matter. A shared field has the same value in every version and language, and workflow and publishing restrictions do not apply to it. Use shared fields for values the curriculum system already approves, such as codes and credit hours, and versioned fields for Arabic and English descriptions that go through review.

Build the finder on a search index. Experience Edge, SitecoreAI’s delivery service, returns at most 1,000 entities per request, limits delivery queries to 80 requests per second, and warns that text filtering and sorting can be inconsistent. Facets and free-text search belong in a search service, and Sitecore says SitecoreAI customers receive baseline entitlements for Search, with features rolling out in phases. Give students the facets they choose by: level, faculty, subject, campus, mode, language of instruction and intake. Test Arabic queries with and without diacritics, and with the spellings students use.

Admissions content by audience

Local, regional and international applicants ask different questions about the same programme, and parents and sponsors ask others again. Give each audience its own page with its own address, in Arabic and English, and link every programme page to the admissions pages that apply.

Audience	What they need to find	How to publish it
Local applicants	Entry requirements by national school certificate, scholarships for nationals and the dates, in Arabic first	A page per level and route in both languages, with requirements as text, owned by admissions
Regional applicants	How their own country’s certificate is assessed, fees for non-nationals, and residence steps where they apply	Country or qualification pages linked from the admissions hub, each with its own address
International applicants	Equivalency for curricula such as IB or A levels, language tests, visas, housing and fees	An international hub with country pages, and contacts for counsellors and agents
Postgraduate and executive	Work experience, interviews, employer sponsorship and part-time formats	Programme pages fed from the curriculum system, with sections the faculty writes
Parents and sponsors	Costs, scholarships, housing, safety and how to pay	Plain pages linked from every admissions page, and an enquiry route into the CRM

Personalization then adds the nudge. A SitecoreAI page variant is seen only by the audience you build for it in Page builder, with up to ten variants per page and five conditions per audience. Use variants for the banner, the call to action and the next event, in the visitor’s language.

Personalize the nudge, publish the facts. Google says it might not crawl, index or rank content that changes with a visitor’s perceived country or language, since its crawler’s default IP addresses appear to be in the USA and it sends no language header. It recommends separate addresses for each locale, annotated with hreflang. Requirements, fees and deadlines belong on pages every crawler can reach.

Events and enquiries that reach the CRM

Open days, information sessions, webinars and fairs abroad need pages that go live on time and come down, or turn into a recap, when the event ends. Their registration forms must land in the CRM with the event code. SitecoreAI Forms send each submission to a webhook: the endpoint must be public HTTPS on port 443 or 8443 with TLS 1.2 or 1.3, it should authenticate, for example with OAuth 2 or Basic, and test submissions carry a test flag. The page does not describe retries, so the receiving service should store each payload before it calls the CRM, and pass the event, programme, audience and language with it. The CRM then sends confirmations and reminders, from Marketing Cloud or your own tool.

Many faculties, one governance model

A university site has many publishers under one brand: faculties, research centres, admissions, the library and alumni. SitecoreAI can run them as separate sites, up to 1,000 per environment. Experience Edge uses one content scope for the whole environment, so security tokens, cache clearing and webhooks cannot be limited to a single site. Treat the environment as one estate, run by a central web team.

Clear ownership. The central team owns templates, components, the brand kit and the programme import. Faculties own their pages, and admissions owns requirements and deadlines.
Rights by item and language. Language Write controls who can edit each language version of an item, Workflow State Write who can update items in each workflow state, and Workflow Command Execute who can run a command such as approve. Rights go to roles and are inherited by child items, so an Arabic editor in one faculty edits only that faculty’s Arabic pages.
Translation with review. AI translation creates language versions of a page and its data sources, guided by a brand kit that sets tone and terminology. With Keep workflow state cleared, each translation starts in the initial state, usually Draft, for review. The page lists no supported languages, so test Arabic output with your own reviewers first.
Review dates. Every programme and admissions page gets a named owner and a review before each intake.

Being cited when students ask AI

Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimizations for AI Overviews or AI Mode. A page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and the usual practices apply: important content in text, internal links, structured data that matches the visible text, and crawling allowed in robots.txt and by your CDN. For a university, that means:

Publish requirements, fees and deadlines as text in both languages, with the PDF prospectus as a copy.
Give each programme one address per language, with each language version linked to the other.
Keep facts consistent across the programme page, the admissions page and the prospectus, since an answer may quote any of them.
Check that robots.txt and CDN rules let in the crawlers of the AI search engines you want to be cited by, then track which pages they cite.

Our AI visibility work starts with that audit.

Where to start

Compare every programme page with the curriculum system, and list each mismatch in fees, requirements and intakes.
Agree the programme content model: which fields the import fills, which the faculty writes, and which are shared across languages.
Write one admissions page per audience, in Arabic and English, before you design personalization.
Map every form to its CRM destination, and test each webhook, failures included.
Already on Sitecore? Start with a health check. Still on XP? ArcShift™ is our migration route to SitecoreAI, and our post on the benefits of moving explains what changes.

Planning a university website on SitecoreAI? See our education work and our education outlook, start with the free Sitecore Health Check if you run Sitecore today, and talk to our education team or send us your RFP. Our Sitecore practice works in Arabic and English.

Frequently asked questions

Can SitecoreAI run separate faculty websites?

Yes. Experience Edge allows up to 1,000 sites per environment, so faculties can have their own sites with shared components and brand rules, run by a central team.

How do programme pages stay in step with the curriculum system?

Make the curriculum system the master and import programme records on a schedule. Keep the values it approves in shared fields, and keep faculty descriptions in versioned fields that are reviewed in each language.

Can we show different admissions content to international applicants?

Yes, with page variants, up to ten per page. Put the requirements themselves on separate pages with their own addresses, since Google may not crawl content that changes with a visitor’s location.

Does SitecoreAI translate into Arabic?

AI translation creates language versions guided by a brand kit, and with Keep workflow state cleared each one starts in Draft for review. Sitecore’s translation page lists no supported languages, so test Arabic output with your own reviewers.

Do we need special files or markup to be cited by AI search engines?

Not for Google, which says no special optimizations are needed for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Pages must be indexed and eligible for a snippet, with important content in text and structured data that matches the visible text.