What "advanced" has to mean now
In 2020 an advanced SEO course meant more of the same: harder link building, bigger sites, technical edge cases. In 2026 it means the part beginner courses do not cover because it did not exist when they were filmed: AI answers taking the click, the entity layer that decides which brands get recommended, chunk-level page structure, and measurement that scores citations rather than rankings. A course can be deep and still not be advanced in that sense. Tech SEO Pro is deep. Rainmakers is advanced. Which one you need depends on which gap you have.
Three gaps, three answers
Gap one: your pages rank but AI answers do not cite you. That is an entity and retrieval problem, and the only product on this site that teaches it with published tests is AI SEO Rainmakers. Its Foundations course runs you through a 15-query baseline across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, scores it out of 100, and then works through crawler access, chunking, entity building and mentions in that order.
Gap two: technical SEO is the thing you avoid. Tech SEO Pro. 66 lessons, homework, an audit checklist, a prioritisation framework. It is the one recorded course in our table that we would still pay a one-time fee for, with the caveat that there are no refunds.
Gap three: you work alone and want people to check your thinking. Traffic Think Tank. A large, stable Slack room across SEO, paid and AI. It is a room, not a course; the academy inside it is older and undated.
What we left out and why
The Blueprint Training is excellent and scores second on our rubric, but it teaches agency operations rather than SEO technique; it is the pick for agency owners. The Affiliate Lab and Authority Hacker's Authority Site System were the advanced affiliate courses of the last decade and have both closed. Gotch SEO Academy's public pages are gone. The free courses are not advanced by their own description.
Questions on this decision
Is AI SEO Rainmakers too advanced for an intermediate SEO?
No, if you have a site you rank and can run a hand sweep of 15 queries across three AI engines. The Foundations course is 14 lessons and about 75 minutes and assumes a working knowledge of SEO, not expertise. What it does not tolerate is having nothing to test on.
Should I take Tech SEO Pro or Rainmakers?
Different gaps. Tech SEO Pro fixes technical SEO for a one-time $697 with no refund. Rainmakers is a monthly community for AI-search visibility with a 7-day refund. If you can only afford one and your sites are technically sound, Rainmakers. If your sites are technically broken, nothing in Rainmakers fixes that first.
Does Traffic Think Tank teach advanced SEO?
It hosts advanced SEOs. The current site does not describe a curriculum in detail and states no live-call cadence. Its value is the peer group.