SEO - full curriculum
How a search engine and an AI answer engine actually decide what to show, and what that makes true about your product.
- 01
How Search Actually Works
Understand the machine before the tactics: what a query is, how pages are fetched, how they are stored, and what 'relevant' is computed from.
- 02
How AI Answers Are Built
An AI answer is a retrieval result with a writer on top. Learn every stage of that pipeline, so a change to it is something you can reason about rather than react to.
- 02.01Embeddings: Matching a Page That Shares No WordsVideo
- 02.02Grounding: An AI Answer Is a Search Result With a Writer on Top3 videos
- 02.03Query Fan-Out: One Question Becomes Twelve Searches3 videos
- 02.04Rerankers: How a Passage Becomes a Citation2 videos
- 02.05The Answer Engines, and Whose Index Each One UsesCurating
- 02.06Why the Same Prompt Answers Differently Twice3 videos
- 03
Being Retrievable At All
Everything in module 1 and 2 is unreachable if the page is never fetched, never indexed, or never rendered. This is the floor.
- 03.01robots.txt, Status Codes, and Blocked vs Noindex3 videos
- 03.02The AI Crawlers: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, Google-ExtendedCurating
- 03.03Rendering: How an SPA Goes Invisible3 videos
- 03.04Canonicals, Duplicates, and the URL as a Permanent Key3 videos
- 03.05Site Architecture: The Graph You Actually Control3 videos
- 03.06Sitemaps, IndexNow, and the Path Into Bing3 videos
- 04
Structure a Machine Can Read
What has to be true about the page itself - for a parser, for a performance measurement, and now for an agent operating it on someone's behalf.
- 04.01Semantic HTML: Writing for a Parser Without Writing for One3 videos
- 04.02Structured Data: What It Earns and Where It Is Not RequiredVideo
- 04.03Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP and CLS3 videos
- 04.04Field vs Lab: CrUX, RUM and Lighthouse3 videos
- 04.05The Page an Agent Sees: DOM, Screenshot, Accessibility Tree3 videos
- 05
Intent and Topic Architecture
Deciding what to write, when the question arrives as a conversation and gets expanded into a dozen searches before anything is retrieved.
- 06
Content With Something Behind It
The difference between content that is technically fine and content a system has any reason to prefer - and the line where scaling it becomes a policy violation.
- 07
Authority, Mentions and Distribution
Where credibility comes from now that a citation can replace a click, and why the off-site graph stopped being a side quest.
- 08
Measurement
Knowing whether any of it worked - across two consoles, a set of vendor tools that measure different things, and a channel where the click may never happen.
- 08.01Search Console, Honestly3 videos
- 08.02The Generative AI Reports: What They Contain and What They Do NotCurating
- 08.03Bing Webmaster Tools and the AI Performance ReportCurating
- 08.04AI Visibility Tools: What a Score Is WorthCurating
- 08.05Attribution Without a Click, and Experiments That Can Be Wrong3 videos
- 09
Turning a Visit Into a User
The seam nobody owns: the ten seconds between arriving from a search and deciding to stay.
- 09.01The Landing Seam: Matching the Page to the Intent That Arrived3 videos
- 09.02The Answer-First Landing Page3 videos
- 09.03Time-to-Value: What Someone Must Reach Before They Stay3 videos
- 09.04Pricing Pages, Free Tiers and the Trial That Converts3 videos
- 09.05Instrumenting the Funnel: Impression to Activated UserCurating
- 10
The Growth Loop
What happens after the first session, and the cadence that makes any of this compound instead of being a campaign.
