Research · Reports
Reports
Market-behavior research: how prospective audiences use AI assistants when they decide. Reports are findings-led and aggregate; each states its sources, sample sizes, and time windows, and recurring editions are re-run so the numbers stay current.
ReportBA-R-2026-022026
The companion evidence review (BA-R-2026-01) established that a large and rising share of prospective students consult AI assistants when deciding where to study, and that, to this publication's knowledge as of July 2026, no measured account of which institutions and services those assistants actually surface has been published. This document is the study protocol for the first measured edition: it pre-registers, before data collection, the estimands, the cell design, the sample-size targets and interval methods, the measurement channels and their calibration, the pooling and multiplicity treatment, the refusal handling, the entity-naming policy, and the criteria under which any change will be claimed. The protocol discloses the statistical design layer in full and withholds the operational layer — concrete phrasings and tooling — per the disclosure floor of BA-C-4. Deviations in the eventual edition will be disclosed against this document. No publication date is promised; the edition follows the data.
ReportBA-R-2026-012026
Prospective students and their families increasingly consult AI assistants when deciding where to study. This report reviews the public evidence — surveys, web-analytics studies, and query-monitoring analyses published between 2023 and 2026 — on the adoption of AI assistants in education and study-abroad decisions. Across independent studies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and among international students, the pattern is consistent: a steep, replicated adoption curve. In the United States, the share of high-school seniors using AI to explore colleges rose from 4% (2023) to 23% (2025). In a UCAS survey of 4,485 prospective UK applicants (November 2025), 48% had used AI to explore their university options. Among 1,622 newly-enrolled international students surveyed in the US and UK in September 2025, 17% used AI in their initial school research. Every figure is reported with its source and, where disclosed, its sample and window; the known bias toward vendor-published data is stated openly. The evidence establishes that visibility in AI answers is now both consequential and measurable for education institutions.