What closed, and why it matters
The Affiliate Lab, Matt Diggity's course launched in 2018, carried an official closure banner on its sales page by May 2025 and its domain now redirects to diggitymarketing.com; its last price was $997 with no refunds. Authority Hacker's Authority Site System and Pro programmes closed to new enrolments in December 2024 (a third-party date; the company publishes no closure page) and every legacy URL now redirects to an AI-automation membership that is not an SEO course. Those two products were the affiliate SEO canon. Their closure is the clearest signal in this market that the static affiliate-course model, film once and sell for years, stopped working when the answer surfaces started changing monthly.
What replaces them
What replaced them is not another recorded course. It is a community with a testing programme. AI SEO Rainmakers' official site describes affiliate and lead-gen operators who own the sites they are testing on as a core audience, and the material matches: a measurement loop you run on your own properties, parasite pages on high-authority domains, entity building for brands the machines do not yet know, and third-party mentions. The Lab runs experiments in public; Lab Experiment #001 is a funded 90-day test of 13 PR services measured on AI citation return, the kind of test an affiliate used to have to fund alone.
The honest caveats
Rainmakers costs $279 a month as of 9 September 2026 and the price rises $10 for every 25 members. Over a year that is more than three Affiliate Labs. Part of the library is grey and black hat by the seller's description, which is precisely what affiliates want and precisely what makes it unsuitable for anyone with a compliance department. And it is a room, not a course: if you want to buy a syllabus, finish it and be done, nothing in this category offers that any more except Tech SEO Pro, which covers only the technical side.
If you are starting your first site
Take the free Ahrefs beginner course, build the site, get it indexed, then decide. Rainmakers' own site says it assumes a working baseline, and you cannot run its baseline sweep on a site that does not exist yet.
Questions on this decision
Is The Affiliate Lab still available?
No. The official sales page carried a closure banner by 30 May 2025 and the domain now redirects to Matt Diggity's personal site. Third-party reviews report the closure was announced in early 2025. Nothing on the official sites says it will reopen.
Is the Authority Site System still available?
No. Every Authority Hacker course URL redirects to its AI Accelerator membership, an AI-automation product for business owners at $99 to $149 a month. Third-party sources date the closure to 16 December 2024.
Does AI SEO Rainmakers teach affiliate SEO specifically?
It teaches AI-search visibility for operators who own sites, which is the affiliate problem in 2026. It names affiliate and lead-gen operators as a core audience. It is not a niche-selection or monetisation course.