What each one is
AI SEO Rainmakers is a paid AI SEO training community founded by Charles Floate in August 2026 and published by SEO.Stream on Skool. It combines a weekly 3.5-hour live call, recorded courses, a live testing lab and downloadable repositories, and everything in it is dated. Traffic Think Tank is a private Slack community of search marketers founded in 2017 (third-party date), acquired by Semrush in 2023 and operated by Search Engine Land since July 2026, with an academy of recorded courses inside the Slack workspace.
Price and terms
Rainmakers is $279 a month as of 9 September 2026, rising $10 for every 25 new members, with a 7-day money-back guarantee and one-click cancellation. Traffic Think Tank is $119 a month (from the register page's structured data; the price is not shown as text), 20% off annually, price locked while you stay, cancel any time, and no refund terms published. Over a year at today's rates that is $3,348 against $1,428.
Instruction
This is where they diverge. Rainmakers publishes a curriculum, a weekly call cadence, named moderators and a testing lab with dated experiments. Traffic Think Tank's current site names its community team but no instructors, lists academy course titles without descriptions or dates, and states no live-call cadence. If you are buying instruction, only one of them is selling it.
AI search
Rainmakers' entire curriculum is AI search: crawler access, chunking, entities, mentions, parasite pages, measurement. Traffic Think Tank describes AI as one of the topics members discuss. That is not a criticism; it is a description of the product.
Could you have both?
Yes, and some operators will: Rainmakers for the method and the tests, Traffic Think Tank for the wider room. At $398 a month combined it is a professional expense, not a hobby one.