Qualification Check
From zero coverage to the Financial Times
How we took Qualification Check from no PR history to the Financial Times, and made it the most-cited brand on admissions fraud across AI.
FT
Financial Times placement, from zero coverage
#1
Most-cited brand in its competitive set across AI
+0%
AI visibility share across tracked terms
+0%
Clicks for its brand term after the FT piece
The Challenge
What we were up against
Qualification Check helps UK universities verify the qualifications of international applicants, working with the heads of admissions, international recruitment leads and compliance officers who sit at the sharp end of an issue the sector knows is real but struggles to prove: admissions fraud. The wider audience runs into HE policy and government stakeholders focused on the integrity of the international student visa system.
The problem was that Qualification Check was completely unknown to the press. There was no prior coverage, no brand reputation to lean on, and no existing relationship with journalists. The objectives were ambitious for a brand in that position: secure coverage in genuinely high-authority publications, position Qualification Check as a thought leader on qualification verification, and make sure that credibility translated into AI and LLM visibility, the emerging channel through which admissions and compliance professionals increasingly research vendors. All of it on a lean £1,200 monthly PR retainer.
The distinctive constraint shaped the whole campaign. With no brand reputation to support a pitch, the story would have to stand entirely on its own merits. So rather than pitch the company, we'd have to make its data the story.
Our Approach
How we tackled it
The strategy rested on the fact that Qualification Check held a dataset no journalist could get anywhere else.
Their analysis of around 55,000 offers made by 45 UK institutions during the 2024-25 admissions cycle gave us unique, quantified evidence of a problem the sector could only previously talk about anecdotally.
Rather than pitch their services, we led with the data, turned the findings into a matter of genuine public and policy interest, and positioned CEO Ed Hall as the credible, quotable expert behind it.
We translated raw verification statistics into clear, newsworthy narratives, built around hooks a journalist could actually run with: a fraud rate of just over 4% across the cycle, undergraduate fraud running substantially higher than postgraduate and overturning a common assumption, specific peak-risk months, and the countries most often linked to falsified qualifications.
Running through all of it was a contemporary AI angle, that advances in artificial intelligence were making forged certificates, replica university websites and fake QR codes far easier to produce, which gave the story relevance well beyond the sector.
In parallel, we treated AI and LLM visibility as its own objective, ensuring the media credibility we were building fed directly into how the brand was surfaced and cited when professionals asked AI tools about qualification verification.
The Results
What we achieved
The campaign secured coverage in three publications, led by the Financial Times, whose piece named Qualification Check's research as the source and quoted Ed Hall as the authority on the issue.
That was joined by Times Higher Education, reaching the core professional HE audience directly, and bdnews24.com, extending reach to a South Asian audience highly relevant to the story's geographic findings.
That authority then took hold across AI:
- •Qualification Check is now the most-cited brand in its competitive set, with more than double the citations of its nearest competitor
- •It holds a 20% overall AI visibility share across tracked terms and providers, with standout positions including a 100% share of voice for a core term in Google AI Overview and strong presence across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Google AI Mode and AI Overview
- •After the Financial Times piece, clicks for the brand term rose 47% week on week, with impressions up 39%, an unusual spike directly attributable to the coverage
Most tellingly, the commercial impact was immediate. Within four days of the coverage going live, one university had reached out directly to book a demo as a result, and the coverage had helped open the door to a strategic conversation with UCAS.
other work
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