SEO and AI search, explained for the person paying for it
A free course for business owners who are buying search work and want to judge whether it is real. Eight lessons. No email required, nothing to install, and every number on these pages comes from data we can show you.
By the end you will be able to hold an intelligent conversation with an agency, recognise a claim that cannot be true, and know which questions to ask. You will not be able to do SEO yourself, and that is the point.
Get the one-page field guide No email required. It is a web page: print it or keep the tab open.
Where the numbers come from
Two of the eight lessons carry figures. They come from our own corpus: 12,778 AI answers collected across 5 engines over 164 days, containing 109,674 citation events across 8,577 distinct domains. Recomputed 2026-09-17 from the data on disk.
The other six lessons carry no figures at all. That is deliberate. Our corpus measures how AI engines cite sources, so it can support lessons 3 and 4 and nothing else. Rather than borrow someone else's statistic to make the other lessons look denser, they carry worked examples instead.
What this corpus cannot tell you:
- It measures which sources AI engines cite. It does not measure Google rankings.
- It covers five engines over 164 days. Engines change, and a number from this window is a reading from this window.
- It says nothing about whether a citation sent anyone to the site, or whether that visitor was worth having.
Where we use a third party's number, it is labelled and linked at source, and we report what it measured rather than the version that flatters us.