About
Arizona College of Nursing (AZCN) is an accredited nursing school dedicated to preparing the next generation of registered nurses. Their 3-year BSN program offers a fast-track pathway to earning a nursing degree and launching a fulfilling nursing career. Combining hands-on clinical practice, advanced simulation labs, and flexible schedules with personalized support, AZCN’s nursing program is designed to prepare students for success from day one.
Dominating AI Search to drive student enrollment
As a top-ranked nursing school, Arizona College of Nursing (AZCN) knows that advancing the future of nursing starts with reaching the next generation of prospective students. Maximizing AZCN’s presence across its 24 distinct markets is Francis Dayton’s core focus as Web Product Manager. For years, his work revolved around SEO keyword targeting and earning page rankings on Google.
As AI‑generated responses became a primary influence on how future nurses researched the program that would launch their career, Francis recognized that AZCN needed to compete inside those answers, beyond just traditional search results.
“As soon as Google rolled out AI Overviews, I knew we needed to dedicate serious focus to showing up in those answers,” says Francis.
AZCN requirements for an AEO platform
If AZCN could act fast on AEO, it could position itself as the go-to source in AI-generated answers for students. That would allow them to secure this visibility ahead of other local competitors.
So Francis set out to find a dedicated AEO platform. Working with Matthew Jensen, Senior Manager of Web & Digital Marketing, he defined four operating demands any solution would need to meet:
- Prompt volume intelligence: Knowing which questions prospective students were actually asking AI answer engines, and how often, would ensure Francis’ content prioritization was based on real demand rather than keyword assumptions.
- Granular AI visibility insights: Francis needed to see what content formats were winning citations in AI-generated answers, which were losing ground, and which local competitors surfaced in each market.
- Scalable content operations: To capture every emerging content opportunity across 24 markets, Francis needed a system that could quickly and effectively convert LLM visibility signals into publish-ready updates.
- Strategic hands-on support: Building AZCN’s AEO practice from scratch required more than a dashboard. Francis needed a team invested in translating LLM signals into a real content strategy, market by market.
A different kind of AEO partner
Nearly all of the platforms Francis and Matthew tested stopped at raw AI visibility data, missing the geographical granularity and workflow capabilities that were critical for scaling AZCN’s hyper-local content strategy.
“Each market is a living organism with its own search landscape, competitors, and topics that interest candidates,” shares Francis. “For our business, being able to track our LLM performance across these dimensions is an absolute must,” adds Eric Sisak, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Expansion.
The solution that checked all of their boxes was Profound. The platform paired market-level AI citation tracking with deep insights into the questions and topics that defined students’ AI conversations. And the team felt less like a vendor and more like an innovative partner committed to AZCN’s success across every market. The exact combination that AZCN required.
Profound powers AZCN’s AEO practice across every market
From the first call, onboarding felt more like a co-build than a handoff.
Working with a dedicated account manager, Francis curated a library of 300+ market-specific prompts prospective students ask to find top-ranked nursing programs. Using one-click custom tags, he created a unified system for tracking AZCN’s LLM performance.
With that foundation in place, Francis runs AZCN’s AEO strategy in Profound via three core motions.
LLM performance monitoring that guides content efforts. For each market-specific prompt set, Francis tracks how often AZCN is cited in AI-generated answers, which competitors outrank it, and how performance varies across content types. This detailed view serves as Francis’ weekly read on AZCN’s competitive position, a non-negotiable input when shaping AZCN’s content roadmap.
Agents that turn intelligence into action. Using Profound Agents, Francis now runs a suite of AI agents that convert AI visibility signals into publish-ready drafts and page updates. Each agentic workflow is mapped to campus tags, local page formats, and AZCN’s brand voice, so one system drives localized execution at scale.
These agents span multiple high-impact use cases:
- For paid landing pages, Francis runs agents that benchmark AZCN’s site against competitors to identify gaps in messaging.
- Another set of agents scans for and acts on niche content opportunities, such as building tuition comparisons and localized FAQs for admissions-related questions.
- These agents also analyze the college’s overall competitiveness in AI Search in minutes by pulling in data from AZCN’s tech stack.
“After an agent is built, we run it per market and generate the insights we need on demand,” Francis highlights.
What once required hours of manual research across multiple tools now runs automatically, freeing the AZCN team to focus on scaling AEO impact.
Built-in education that compounds LLM performance. With Profound, Francis has a complete AEO system, plus a built‑in path to leveling up his own expertise. Profound University, their educational hub, offers short, structured courses on AEO fundamentals and data‑driven marketing, helping Francis sharpen AZCN’s AEO strategy without slowing down execution.
The way that Francis approaches his work, using marketing instincts and expertise combined with an engineering mindset, is representative of a new role that is emerging: the Marketing Engineer. His agentic workflows are a model for others to emulate and has informed Profound University coursework. “We partnered with Profound because what they’ve been building in AI visibility has been next-level. Then they rolled out their AI agents, and we’ve since compressed hours’ worth of work into minutes. They’ve enabled us to build an entirely new operating muscle for AEO at AZCN and continue upleveling as the landscape evolves.”
#1 most-cited domain for priority prompts
With Profound, AZCN built a rigorous AEO practice that helps them reach aspiring nurses searching for the program that will prepare them to serve their communities. Across 24 distinct markets, that visibility has turned into a compounding growth advantage.
“We’re now the top-cited domain for our priority BSN prompts,” shares Francis. “That citation share directly fuels enrollment interest.”
In 90 days:
- 51% increase in AI-referred enrollment inquiries, driven by surfacing targeted content in program comparison and cost queries
- 26% increase in AI-driven website visits, with consistent gains across markets
- #1 most cited domain across key prompts, ahead of local college competitors and other citation sources
- 12% increase in AI visibility across the most-asked nursing program questions in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini
- 20 hours saved monthly with Profound Agents, by automating workflows like weekly AEO reporting and niche, campus-specific content creation
Looking ahead
For Francis, the next chapter with Profound is all about going deeper on Agents.
Completing Profound’s Agent Engineering Certification puts him in the first cohort of marketers trained to design, deploy, and measure the impact of AEO agents at scale. “Having a team member certified by Profound is a great value-add for the college, especially considering where the industry is headed,” says Francis.
He is also exploring use cases for agent-driven workflows across departments like admissions operations and student services, further enhancing AZCN’s ability to inspire and attract the next generation of nurses.
