Language schools and immersion programmes
Three in ten language schools carry a critical fault.
Language school decisions are made by students and parents researching from another country, in another language, increasingly by asking an AI assistant. That is the one audience that cannot phone you to check.
“Where should I do a language course in Spain?”
Languages measured: Nine — English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese and Portuguese.
We ask in the language your students actually search in, not in translated English — and we include a model used in mainland China, where ChatGPT is not available. Most tools measure neither.
124 language schools, audited.
- 124
- audited
- 30%
- carry a critical fault
- 19%
- have a server refusing an AI crawler
- 20%
- publish an llms.txt
Median readiness score 71 out of 100. 7% block a crawler deliberately in robots.txt — more than any other programme type. Audited 8 August 2026.
The highest critical-fault rate of any large category.
Of 124 language schools we audited, 30% carry a critical technical fault, against an average of 27% across educational travel — and the highest rate of any category with more than a hundred organisations in it.
They also block AI crawlers deliberately more often than anyone else: 7%, against 1–5% everywhere else. Some of that is intentional and considered. Much of it is a plugin default nobody chose.
Free score. A person runs it, not a robot.
Enter your website address and we run the technical audit on your real site — eight AI crawlers checked against your robots.txt, and ChatGPT's, Claude's and Perplexity's sent as real requests to see what your server actually does. You get your score and the single biggest thing holding you back. Only for new clients.
No account, no card.
Four out of five sites we audit have at least one fault we can name. The typical site has two or three. The free score gives you your score and the most serious one, in plain English, with the fix. The rest come with the full audit — along with the half of the picture the free score cannot see: whether AI assistants actually recommend you, and who they recommend instead. You also get a sample of typically 5 questions put to the AI models, so you can see what a subscription looks like in practice.
Or start measuring properly
Monthly monitoring from $29. The technical check every month, your visibility rate tracked over time, and the competitors named instead of you.
See the plans →Or buy the one-off AI Visibility Audit — $450. A full diagnosis in one document, delivered within seven working days. →
What the full audit covers
- 180 real questions from students and parents, across 5 AI models in the nine languages your students search in — English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese and Portuguese.
- Every question asked three times.
- Whether AI recommends a school at all, or points students to Duolingo and italki instead.
- How it answers the accreditation and student-visa questions that decide enrolments.
- Which schools get named in your place, in each source market, language by language.
- Which directories and review sites the models actually trust.
- Eight prioritised fixes.
- Written recommendations from me, not a dashboard export.
The five assistants we ask: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Qwen. The first four search the web while they answer; Qwen answers from what it already knows, and is included here rather than a European model because a large share of language-school enquiries begin in Chinese.
Your students search in their own language.
Whatever language you teach, your students are somewhere else before they book, and they start looking in the language they already speak. The answer an AI assistant gives is not the same in each one. The first operator we measured properly was named in 21% of English answers and 7% of German ones — their customers were substantially German-speaking, and nobody had told them.
Which markets matter depends on what you teach and who you teach it to. For an English school in the UK, Italy is the largest source market, Saudi Arabia second, and Türkiye third and growing fastest — up 21% in student weeks last year. For a Spanish school in Andalucía or an Italian school in Tuscany the list is a different one entirely. That is why you choose your own markets rather than us choosing them for you.
We ask in nine languages: English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese and Portuguese. They are not translations of one another — a French student asks whether a school is CPF-eligible and a German one asks whether it counts as Bildungsurlaub, and those are the questions that decide where they book.
This is early. In a 2025 survey of international students, 17% had used an AI assistant during their search — but 81% of those found it more helpful than the websites and brochures they were comparing it against, and take-up runs at about 30% in South Korea and the Philippines. (ICEF Monitor, January 2026)
UK source market figures: English UK, 2025 full-year statistics.
Read what we can and cannot measure, and why we report the limits — our method →
Find out what AI tells a student in Bogotá, São Paulo or Shanghai.
Start with the free check above, or ask us a question.
The AI Visibility Audit is $450, and it is included with annual Track and Lead plans. See pricing →