I spent a large part of this year looking at education company websites. Close to 2,000 of them, each scored against one question. Does the content here help anyone decide?
I expected a publishing problem, which is the standard diagnosis in education and was sitting in my own notes before I started. The sector under-invests and does not publish enough.
I knew that was wrong by about the second week. These companies had blogs, resource hubs, webinars, customer videos, university logos. One higher-ed vendor I audited even had the competitor comparison page almost nobody builds, alongside a real product story and marquee references. The raw material was there. The gap sat one step further down, where a buyer decides.
Three in five ran a genuine content operation. By the usual test, the sector passes comfortably. The full numbers are in The State of Content Marketing for Education Companies in 2026.
Then I sorted everything by the job it was doing, and the floor gave way.
The Content That Closes Is the Content Nobody Makes
Awareness content outnumbered decision-stage content by more than two to one. At format level:
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- Pricing on fewer than one in four sites
- Case studies on about 35%
- Objection-handling content on about 30%
- Comparison pages on about 5%
- ROI calculators on about 3%
Sales enablement, scored as one dimension, came out at 1.57 out of 4. That was the lowest measure in the study by a clear margin.
The comparison-page number is the one I keep returning to. Somebody is comparing your platform to a competitor right now, and that page exists whether or not you wrote it. When 95% of a market declines to write it, the page your buyer reads belongs to a competitor, or to an affiliate who has never put either product in front of a class.
The strangest version I found was a vendor that had done the work. It had built the comparison page against its largest rival, which puts it in the top few percent of the sector. Then an auto-launching promotional modal covered the hero and the primary call to action on load. Every crawler and every assistant that visited captured the overlay. They had paid for the rare asset and then hidden it from the machines now summarising their category.
Why This Costs More in EdTech Than Almost Anywhere
In most industries a missing ROI calculator is a small gap. In education technology it is structural, and the reason is who signs.
A curriculum lead champions it, an IT director assesses security, a business manager approves the spend, and a principal or superintendent decides, usually against a budget window that opens once a year. So your champion is almost never your signatory. They argue your case in a room you are not in, to people who never saw the demo. Publish nothing that helps them and you have handed over unpaid homework. Plenty never do it. The deal stops moving, and you file it under “went quiet”.
The clearest version I have seen recently was a test-prep company of about seventy people. I wrote to the founder about how their site converts. He replied inside a week, interested, and passed it to a principal architect to assess. Not a marketer. An infrastructure engineer, because there was no marketing owner to pass it to. Across a good part of this sector, that is who evaluates a content problem and then has to carry it back upstairs.
Pricing opacity behaves the same way. Institutional buyers work to allocated budgets, and a procurement officer with four platforms on a list needs to know early whether you fit the envelope. Withholding it gets you removed before anyone speaks to you.
The Compliance Content Almost Nobody Writes
One finding surprised me more than the rest, and it is specific to this sector. Regulatory content appeared in some form on about 82% of sites. GDPR on roughly 63%, FERPA on about 62%, COPPA on about 47%. Looks well covered. Depth is another matter. Around 49% offered a mention, a privacy-policy line, a badge. Genuinely deep coverage, a real hub answering what a data protection officer actually asks, appeared on about 2%.
The IT director assessing you has the same list every time. Where student data sits, who processes it, what happens at termination, how parental consent works, which sub-processors you use. Those arrive in every serious procurement, and most vendors answer them reactively, six weeks in, in a questionnaire. Answer them publicly instead and you take weeks out of your own sales cycle while occupying territory nobody has claimed.
Why I Think the AI Gap Stays Open
AI Overviews now appear on roughly 85% of high-intent education queries. Traditional featured snippets, about 5% of the same searches. Meanwhile answer-engine optimisation appeared in about one in eighty education marketing job specs. TikTok appeared roughly ten times more often.
The comfortable reading is that this corrects itself, because rankings carry over into AI answers. I think that is wrong, and I have stopped assuming it.
In July I ran the same category questions through ChatGPT and Perplexity for one test-prep vendor. On Google it sat sixth on page one for a state assessment term doing about 5,400 searches a month. Perplexity cited it. ChatGPT, asked what a district should shortlist, named six vendors and a couple of state portals, and did not mention it once.
Rank and AI presence are becoming separate assets that have to be earned separately. Almost nobody is being hired to earn the second one. That is why I think this window stays open longer than people expect, and why I would rather a client spent this quarter on citable comparison and category pages than on another channel experiment.
Why Universal Weakness Is Worth Something
None of these gaps belongs to a weak segment of the market. They are close to universal, which is why they are worth acting on at all. Fixing what everybody neglects mostly means showing up where nobody is.
Higher-growth companies scored better on every dimension, with steady rather than spectacular margins. Content presence 52% against 43%, sales enablement 1.66 against 1.52. No single gap is large, and they move together. Funding status barely moved any of them, which points at operating habits rather than budget.
Most edtech companies already own the raw material. Outcomes sit in customer success notes. Security answers sit in finished questionnaires, and the objections live in the head of whoever runs the demos. Almost none of it reaches the site. For your own position against the benchmark, we built a short diagnostic scoring a site on twelve of the study’s measures.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Counts as Decision-stage Content for an EdTech Company?
Material a buyer uses to choose between options rather than to understand a problem. In edtech: pricing, comparison pages, implementation guides, compliance documentation, business-case tools, and case studies naming real institutions and outcomes.
Why Do Comparison Pages Matter in Education Technology?
Buyers compare platforms before contacting vendors, and that content exists whether you publish it or not. It sits on roughly 5% of education company websites, so it is usually a competitor’s page they read.
