Prospective students are searching differently, using AI tools that answer questions directly rather than sending them to your website. See what we've built to make sure your courses, and the careers they lead to, are part of those answers.
Pathways works great when embedded in your website's course pages, showing prospective students the careers they can go into from that course. They land on your page, read about the course, and see our career-rich content sitting right there alongside it.
Pathways is delivered as an embedded iframe, added to your page with a single line of JavaScript. It's built this way so there's no admin, no setup, and everything just works. To a visitor, everything looks and feels native to your page. But LLMs and search engines read the underlying source differently, and the careers content technically comes from our career-pathways domain rather than yours.
What we did first: structured data
Earlier this year, we launched a feature that adds structured JSON-LD data to your course pages, telling search engines and LLMs exactly which careers relate to each course.
This works well, and it's a strong first step. But it's still delivered via JavaScript, injected into your page as part of Pathways loading. Not every AI crawler processes JavaScript-injected content the same way, so we wanted a solution that didn't rely on it at all.
The rise of AI search
Increasingly, students are having their questions answered without ever visiting a website. Tools like Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude read from a huge range of sources and hand back a tailored, detailed answer, often without the user clicking through anywhere. These are known as zero-click results.
For colleges, that raises a real question: if a student never clicks through, how do you make sure the answer they're given still includes you?
What we've built: Student Choices
To make sure your courses are found by students using AI search tools, and that those results include real career detail, we've built Student Choices.
Student Choices is the UK's definitive career-led FE course finder, with over 20,000 live courses from more than 150 colleges across the country, and growing all the time. It's a centralised, structured resource that gives search engines and LLMs a single reliable source to draw on, rather than piecing information together from hundreds of individual college websites.
Student Choices is powered by Pathways, so it always reflects your live courses. As your course offer changes on your website, Student Choices updates automatically to match, with every course mapped to careers in exactly the same way as the content already running on your own pages.
Every page is built specifically to be read by search engines and LLMs, setting out your course offer alongside the careers, salaries and employment outcomes they lead to.
What this looks like in practice
When a student searches Gemini for something like "EV charging courses in Walsall" or "courses to become a community nurse," the answer they get back can now include specific career progression content sourced directly from Student Choices, alongside anything from your own website.
Even in a zero-click result, where the student never visits a page at all, they're still being shown career progression content sourced directly from Student Choices, powered by your integration with Pathways.
Get listed
Existing Pathways customers are already listed and generating results now. Take a look at the Student Choices website.
Not a Pathways customer? You can list your courses on Student Choices without taking out a subscription — get in touch to find out how.
