Search Influence Joins UPCEA MEMS 2026 With Two AI Search Visibility Sessions
November 5th, 2026 by
Search Influence will attend the 35th annual UPCEA MEMS 2026 Conference in Orlando, Florida, from November 30 to December 2, at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort. The team will present two sessions on AI search visibility and meet fellow higher education marketers at our booth.
MEMS is the annual UPCEA event on marketing, enrollment management, and student success for online and professional continuing education. As a Platinum Partner of UPCEA, we look forward to engaging with colleagues from institutions across the field.
Search Influence Sessions at MEMS 2026
The Blind Spot in Your Reporting: Tracking AI Presence and Citations
Speaker: Will Scott, CEO and Co-Founder, Search Influence
December 1, 10:00 a.m., Cancun Room
Reports can show healthy rankings and steady traffic while AI systems leave your programs out of the answer. Prospective students build shortlists from those answers, and a standard dashboard does not tell you whether you made the list.
Will tested Search Influence’s own site. Presence tracking showed 37.8% of AI answers citing the site in Google AI Mode and 0.0% in Claude. The content was the same in both cases. The difference came down to crawler access, which standard SEO reporting never surfaced.
As an attendee of “The Blind Spot in Your Reporting: Tracking AI Presence and Citations,” you will leave knowing where your programs stand in AI answers and how to keep watching, with tools you already own.
This session is part of the Insights & Innovation format, in which presenters each introduce a single idea in 10 minutes.
The True Value of Visibility: How Harvard Made AI Search an Enrollment Channel
Speakers: Paula French, Director of Sales and Marketing, Search Influence, and Tara Pope, Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School
December 1, 11:15 a.m., Coronado MN Room
The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School is a global authority in negotiation education and home to frameworks such as BATNA and the Seven Elements. While AI tools consistently cited its thought leadership, prospects searching for executive education were not finding its programs.
Working with Search Influence, the program developed an AI search strategy based on the three pillars of GEO: entities, semantic relevance, and citations. The team restructured program pages, repositioned content for AI discovery, and implemented schema so AI tools surface the right pages for the right queries.
Tara will share the results of six months of executed AI search strategy, building on early findings previewed at the UPCEA Annual Conference. Paula will add two years of UPCEA and Search Influence research on AI program discovery.
As an attendee of “The True Value of Visibility: How Harvard Made AI Search an Enrollment Channel,” you will leave with the steps the program took to turn AI search into an enrollment channel and the data behind its decisions.
Free AI Search Resources
Two resources are available ahead of the conference.
- The AI Website Grader checks a webpage for AI search readiness, technical health, structured data, content, and on-page SEO, then returns a score with prioritized fixes. Try it for free today to get a baseline of where you stand in AI search.
- How Prospects Search in 2026 is our second-year research study with UPCEA. It shows that 64% of prospective students trust an institution more when AI cites it as a source, up from 56% in 2025. Download the study before MEMS to see the research behind Paula’s session.
See You at MEMS 2026
Search Influence’s AI SEO and higher education digital marketing teams work with institutions every day on being visible in AI answers. MEMS offers an opportunity to exchange ideas with colleagues who are working on the same questions.
In between sessions, be sure to visit our booth to meet Will Scott, Alison Zeringue, Paula French, and Jeanne Lobman. We’ll talk AI search visibility and offer Search Influence-branded sunglasses to visitors!