Planning for the Future of AI-Powered Search
Exploring how educators will use search engines to find resources, plan, and adapt in an AI-first future, and how education resources and content can stay discoverable, useful, and trusted.
“With AI rapidly reshaping the education space, it’s easy to feel both excited and overwhelmed by the possibilities. iF’s insights helped us cut through the noise and better understand the implications of the strategic choices in front of us. That clarity sparked meaningful debate, encouraged creative thinking, and helped us zero in on the areas we believe matter most right now and in the near future.”
The Need: AI Is Already Changing How We Search
AI tools are rapidly reshaping how educators find and use instructional content online. With search itself shifting from keyword lists to personalized, conversational, and generative experiences, the OER Project wanted to ensure its content will continue to reach educators in the next era of AI search.
The OER Project provides free, innovative curricula and a variety of teaching tools focused on subjects such as Big History, World History and Climate. The OER Project’s impact lies in expanding access to high quality learning materials while supporting educators with research-based pedagogy and community. Through this project and anticipating the needs of teachers and students as they navigate a shifting search landscape, the OER Project, even more learners can develop critical thinking skills, and better understand the complex forces shaping today’s world.
The Challenge: Make Content Discoverable, Useful, and Trustworthy
As large language models become embedded into everyday search tools, the line between finding content and generating content is beginning to blur. This raises new questions for content producers like the OER Project:
- How will the main search engines incorporate generative AI alongside general search?
- What content will be most accessible and prioritized by search engines to users in this future state and why?
- What lesson planning tools will be available to teachers alongside traditional search?
We set out to explore those questions and to help the OER Project take strategic action to ensure their cutting-edge open source content keeps pace with rapidly emerging technology.
Our Approach: Three Realistic Futures for Teachers
Our cross-sector team of expert educators, strategists, and EdTech futurists got together to collaboratively brainstorm and consider: given the pace of changing technology, what will the 'teacher search' of the future look like? We started with a strategic scan of the fast-moving AI and education landscape. This included analyzing product announcements from leading search platforms, examining business models behind AI integration, and tracking how generative tools are reshaping online behavior. We considered what changes we can predict in technology, and how that relates to what we know about teacher behaviors and how they are shifting. Some of the questions we asked were:
- Will LLMs replace the need for teachers to search, and build lesson plans for teachers?
- Will teachers still want or need to use additional resources?
- How will prompting, or tech access globally impact search technology and behaviors?
- What is the reason why teachers search that is different from someone information-gathering throughout their day?
Instead of projecting a generic future, we translated those trends into high-fidelity scenarios grounded in real lesson planning and classroom moments. Each prototype illustrated how a teacher might plan with AI at their side, blending search, suggestion, and content generation in a single workflow and platform. The result was a set of forward-looking yet practical visions that revealed where OER Project’s content could play a central, visible role.
We created three designed, hypothetical search scenarios, each anchored in a different teacher use case like “I don’t have a lesson plan but I’m thinking about how I can connect current events to past historical events and help students identify patterns. Can you help find or create one?”. Each flow illustrated what search might look like five years from now: faster, more conversational, more curated, and capable of remixing content formats. Teachers interacted with the AI by typing or clicking suggestions and could adapt or combine videos, texts, and activities in one experience.
What We Learned: Designing for Relevance and Trust
This project surfaced both opportunity and tension in the future of AI-powered search. We know that:
- Trust matters. AI-generated content must still signal credibility, source quality, and pedagogical intent. Teachers want to know where things come from and whether they align with good practice.
- Teachers do and will want autonomy. They don't want pre-written lesson plans, they want to be able to curate and create something specific to them and their students, and predicting how that search will look and act is part of our job.
- AI will combine and remix content across formats. Teachers will not just search for a video or article. They will expect AI to build a starter lesson that includes both or to create new materials from scratch.
- Content needs to be structured for discovery. Titles, transcripts, metadata, and instructional tags all increase the odds that OER Project materials will surface in AI search results.
Why It Matters: Getting Ahead of the Curve
The future of search is already here, but it is unevenly distributed. As teachers adapt to AI in their everyday practice, the organizations that support them must ensure their content can meet the moment. This work gave the OER Project a head start in understanding what that future might look like and what it takes to remain relevant, trusted, and useful.