How Rugby School Japan is using doris to win at AI-era school search

About Rugby School Japan

Rugby School Japan (RSJ) opened in 2023 in Kashiwanoha Smart City, around 30 minutes from central Tokyo, as the first British boarding school in the Greater Tokyo area. Part of the prestigious, 450-year-old Rugby School Group, RSJ a co-educational day and boarding school for ages 11 to 18, now home to more than 300 pupils from over 30 nationalities.

Anna Iveson, its experienced Director of Marketing and Admissions, has the job of getting RSJ in front of the right families to drive enrolments of both boarding and non-boarding students

The Challenge

As the first British boarding school in Greater Tokyo, Rugby School Japan occupies an unusual position. Direct competition is limited to one other school, but being first also means that part of the job is introducing local families to British boarding education in the first place, before they will consider it for their children.

Demand for RSJ has been very strong. The boarding houses are approaching capacity, with the boys' expected to be full early next year and the girls' by the end of the next academic year. With residential places filling that fast, RSJ's focus for future growth has switched to attracting day pupils, competing with schools that don't necessarily offer boarding.

To stand out and raise awareness of the school, Anna Iveson knew that RSJ needed to do something different become more visible on a channel parents increasingly use to discover their options: AI. 

Why Rugby School Japan chose doris

Before doris, RSJ had trialled another school discovery website without meaningful results: traffic stayed flat and the quality of enquiries did not improve. When Anna first heard about doris, it stood out particularly for its potential to bring partner schools visibility on AI tools.

doris is built to be exactly the kind of impartial, well-structured source that Google surfaces in AI overviews and snippets, and that LLMs like ChatGPT recommend when parents turn to them to navigate their school search. The doris team articulated clearly how much they invest in AI visibility, prioritising schema markup at product level and AIO at content level. Exactly what Anna wanted to support RSJ's strategy.

Results: AI visibility drives applications

A few months after going live in late February, RSJ is the most-viewed school on doris in Japan. That visibility is translating into real interest: 600+ profile views, and 170+ parents shortlisting RSJ on the platform school and taking high-intent actions such as requesting information or booking a tour.

Most importantly, it feeds into RSJ's wider goal of driving more enrolments by being recommended, more and more, by AI. In the last year alone, 2.5% of RSJ's applications came from parents who first found the school through AI tools, up from 0% the year before. Anna expects that figure to keep climbing, and doris to play a growing part in it.