Three principles
Best is conditional. Every recommendation on this site names the buyer it is for and the buyer it is not for. A course can be our pick for advanced SEOs and a poor choice for a beginner at the same time, and we say both.
Facts come from the seller's own pages. Price, format, refund terms, live-call cadence and audience claims are read from the official sales page, checkout and terms of service, and dated. Where we could not verify something we write "not stated" rather than guess. Third-party claims are labelled as third-party.
The rubric is public so the scores can be argued with. If you think we scored something wrong, the note under each score bar says which rubric line we applied. Email the page and we will either fix it or explain.
The eight criteria
Each criterion is scored 0 to 5. The total is out of 40. The note under each bar on a review page says which rubric line the score came from.
| Curriculum freshness | How recently the material was updated and whether updates are dated. 5 = dated updates at least monthly. 3 = updated within the last 12 months. 1 = undated or older than two years. 0 = retired or unavailable. |
|---|---|
| Instructor credibility | Is a named person accountable for the material, with a public record you can check? 5 = named practitioner with a long public track record who teaches in person. 3 = named staff instructors. 1 = anonymous or team-authored with no accountable name. |
| Evidence and testing transparency | Does the course show its tests? 5 = live tests with dates and outcomes published to members. 3 = case studies with numbers. 1 = claims without data. 0 = none. |
| Depth of material | Hours and scope. 5 = 20+ hours or a growing library. 4 = 10 to 20 hours. 3 = 5 to 10 hours. 2 = 2 to 5 hours. 1 = under 2 hours. |
| Live support and access | 5 = weekly live calls with the named instructor plus daily community access. 4 = live calls with staff. 3 = community Q&A only. 1 = email support. 0 = none. |
| Practical tools and templates | 5 = working software or repositories you can run. 4 = templates, SOPs and prompt libraries. 2 = worksheets. 0 = none. |
| Value relative to price | What you get per dollar for the stated audience. Free courses score 5 by definition if the material is competent. Paid products are judged on inclusions per month or per one-time fee. |
| Suitability for the stated audience | Does the course deliver what it says it is for, to the people it says it is for? 5 = precise, honest fit statement and the material matches it. 3 = broad claims. 1 = mismatch between marketing and material. |
Weighting and ties
All eight criteria carry equal weight in the total. When two products are within three points of each other we break the tie on evidence and testing transparency, because a course that shows its tests is the one whose advice will still be right in six months.
What we did not do
We did not buy every product. The editor holds a paid seat in AI SEO Rainmakers and has completed its Foundations course. For the other eight live products we read the official pages, checkouts, terms and publicly available module lists. Where a product's full curriculum is behind a login and not described publicly, its depth score reflects only what the seller states.
We did not use student testimonials from sales pages as evidence for any score. We did not collect user reviews of our own. We did not include any product whose public sales page no longer exists.
The relationship, and the wall
The editor of this site, Bike Hawley, is a paying member of AI SEO Rainmakers and has contributed material to its course library. We may receive a referral commission if you join through a link on this site. Three things follow from that.
- Rainmakers is scored on exactly the same rubric as everything else, and its score notes are the longest on the site because we expect them to be checked.
- Rainmakers is recommended only for the audience its own site says it is for. In the Rainmakers review the "who should not buy it" section is not a formality.
- Where a competitor is the better choice for a given buyer, we say so on the comparison page and on the buyer's guide. The Blueprint Training is our pick for agency operations. Tech SEO Pro is our pick for technical SEO. AI Ranking is the pick if $279 a month is out of reach. The free Ahrefs course is our pick for beginners.
Re-checking
Prices and terms are re-read against official pages at least monthly. Every change is logged with a date in the change log, and the machine-readable copy of every fact is at /data/courses.json.