v2 curriculum Courses 0 & 1 free
Build durable owned-audience assets
Thirteen courses. 78 lessons. 78 artifacts. The premise is not that you will out-rank anyone — it is that search is becoming zero-click and AI-mediated, and the only assets worth building are the ones that still work when the intermediary stops sending traffic.
The governing question, asked in every course: If Google disappeared tomorrow, why would anyone still come back to this brand?
The seven rules that govern every course
These are not slogans. Each one appears as a constraint inside the labs, the gates and the artifacts, and several of them will tell you to stop.
1. Claims expire after 90 days
Every platform, policy or commercial claim carries a verification date and expires. Expired claims go back to the primary source or come off the page.
2. A 12-month cost model with kill criteria
Before building, price twelve months honestly and write the conditions under which you will stop. Criteria written before you are attached are the only ones worth anything.
3. The governing question
If Google disappeared tomorrow, why would anyone still come back to this brand? Any asset with no answer is not funded.
4. Launch three sites first
Three is the smallest number that allows comparison and the largest you can run honestly. Ten sites only after the gates pass — and then one at a time.
5. MVP = 12 high-value assets
Not 30 pages. Two pillars, three money pages, two tools, two original data assets, three support articles — tool and newsletter before the support content.
6. Content ratio 20/30/30/20
20% acquisition, 30% research, 30% tools and templates, 20% commercial — applied to the 12-asset MVP, not to a hypothetical future site.
7. A live risk register, 10 categories
Platform, traffic and revenue concentration, compliance, accuracy, key person, technical, data loss, runway, reputation — each with a leading indicator and a pre-committed trigger.
Plus: concentration limits
Affiliate ≤30% of revenue, single site ≤50%, single traffic source ≤60%, single sponsor ≤25%. Uncomfortable in a good quarter; the reason you survive a bad one.
One fixed spine, thirteen times
Every course — including the free ones — has exactly the same structure, so you always know what you are getting and what you owe at the end.
6 lessons
Each one answers What is it?, Why it matters and How to do it in numbered steps, then common mistakes and pro astuces.
1 lab per lesson
Applied work on your own site, not a hypothetical example. Six labs per course.
1 artifact per lesson
A concrete output you keep — a model, a register, a record. 78 artifacts across the curriculum.
1 scenario assessment
A realistic situation with an uncomfortable decision. Scenarios replace more than half the old quizzes because recall was never the hard part.
1 final project
The course deliverable, with a written pass standard you can check yourself against.
1 checklist + 1 AI-agent prompt
A saved checklist for execution, and a constrained prompt that refuses to invent benchmarks or soften a kill decision.
The curriculum and the price ladder
Courses 0 and 1 are free so that you can reach a defensible no without paying. After that each course costs more than the one before it, because each governs a larger irreversible decision — legal exposure, monetisation, then portfolio capital.
| # | Course | Level | Lessons | Time | Price | You finish with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Decision Economics, Risk & Kill Criteria | Beginner | 6 | 6 h | Free | A 12-month cost model and written kill criteria |
| 1 | Search Foundations in the AI Era | Beginner | 6 | 6 h | Free | A zero-click survival scorecard |
| 2 | Niche Selection & Displacement Scoring | Beginner | 6 | 6 h | $19 | Three funded niches, displacement-adjusted |
| 3 | Owned Audience & the Newsletter as Product | Beginner | 6 | 6 h | $29 | An issue template and three finished issues |
| 4 | Architecture, Cloudflare & the Legal Launch Gate | Intermediate | 6 | 6 h | $39 | A 12-asset MVP live behind a legal gate |
| 5 | Technical SEO, Performance & Ops | Intermediate | 6 | 6 h | $49 | An ops runbook and a CWV baseline |
| 6 | Answer-Engine Visibility | Intermediate | 6 | 6 h | $59 | A citation and brand-demand baseline |
| 7 | Content, E-E-A-T & Editorial Economics | Intermediate | 6 | 6 h | $69 | Cost per asset and a claim register |
| 8 | On-Page, CRO & Tool UX | Intermediate | 6 | 6 h | $79 | One money page and one working tool |
| 9 | APIs, Analytics & the AI Surface | Advanced | 6 | 6 h | $99 | A dashboard measuring the AI surface |
| 10 | Links, Partnerships & Digital PR | Advanced | 6 | 6 h | $119 | One original data campaign |
| 11 | Monetization, Compliance & Resilience | Advanced | 6 | 6 h | $149 | A revenue stack with four hard caps |
| 12 | Capstone: The 3-Site Portfolio | Capstone | 6 | 8 h | $199 | Three gate records and an executed verdict |
Paid courses show lesson 1 as a free preview. Unlocking is simulated locally in this demo — no payment is taken and nothing leaves your browser. See the full price ladder →
The three Phase 1 sites
Rule 4 in practice. Every lab in the curriculum is executed against one of these three, each with a 12-asset MVP, a weekly brief and one tool — never thirty pages.
SMB Finance & Banking
Weekly Cash Flow Brief. High advertiser value, high compliance burden, and a reader with a recurring task rather than a one-off question.
Launch window: day 0–30
B2B SaaS & AI Tools
Weekly Stack Brief. Fast-moving subject matter where 90-day claim expiry does real work, and where comparison honesty is the whole product.
Launch window: day 30–45
SMB Cybersecurity
Weekly SMB Security Brief. Genuine expertise requirements, a reviewer cost you must budget, and an audience that returns for ongoing risk rather than definitions.
Launch window: day 60–90
Month 3 judges execution only. Month 6 tests the demand thesis. Month 9 issues one verdict per site — keep, prune or kill — against criteria you wrote before you were attached to anything. If all three sites pass every gate, the thresholds were set too low. See Course 12 →
All courses
Decision Economics, Risk & Kill Criteria
Decide whether the site should exist at all: a 12-month cost model, unit economics and payback, a falsifiable thesis, kill/freeze/pivot criteria, build-vs-buy due diligence and a governance dashboard.
Free · 6 lessons · 6 artifacts
Search Foundations in the AI Era
How discovery actually works now: zero-click behaviour, AI answer surfaces, what gets displaced, search vs task vs return intent, and the zero-click survival scorecard.
Free · 6 lessons · 6 artifacts
Niche Selection & Displacement Scoring
Score niches on displacement risk, not just advertiser value: AI answer vulnerability, compliance burden, reviewer cost, return-demand potential, and the funded/displaced topic split.
$19 · 6 lessons · 6 artifacts
Owned Audience & the Newsletter as Product
Treat the newsletter as the product, not the promotion: issue templates, a 12-week calendar, retention measurement, consent and portability, and payback against the cost model.
$29 · 6 lessons · 6 artifacts
Architecture, Cloudflare & the Legal Launch Gate
Ship the 12-asset MVP on Cloudflare Pages with a reusable component library, a portable data layer, and a legal gate no page passes without disclosure, ownership and counsel review.
$39 · 6 lessons · 6 artifacts
Technical SEO, Performance & Ops
Crawlability and indexing, canonicals and redirects, Core Web Vitals measured with ads live, structured data, monitoring, and an ops runbook with tested backups.
$49 · 6 lessons · 6 artifacts
Answer-Engine Visibility
Being cited rather than clicked: extractable structure, entity and brand demand, citation tracking, the impressions-stable/clicks-falling pattern, and displacement triage.
$59 · 6 lessons · 6 artifacts
Content, E-E-A-T & Editorial Economics
The 20/30/30/20 ratio, information gain, the claim register with 90-day expiry, reviewer registers and real reviewer cost, cost per asset, and pruning on evidence.
$69 · 6 lessons · 6 artifacts
On-Page, CRO & Tool UX
Money-page anatomy, honest comparison tables that keep the drawbacks column, tool UX that saves state, disclosure placed before the reader acts, and on-page testing.
$79 · 6 lessons · 6 artifacts
APIs, Analytics & the AI Surface
Search Console and GA4 APIs, key safety, AI-surface measurement, return-demand metrics, and one dashboard that reports durable outcomes instead of vanity totals.
$99 · 6 lessons · 6 artifacts
Links, Partnerships & Digital PR
Original data campaigns, association and community partnerships with written terms, expert commentary, refusing undisclosed paid placement, and cost per durable outcome.
$119 · 6 lessons · 6 artifacts
Monetization, Compliance & Resilience
The revenue stack and its true independent driver count, the four concentration limits, ads without wrecking the asset, direct offers, the compliance floor, and the 10-category risk register.
$149 · 6 lessons · 6 artifacts
Capstone: The 3-Site Portfolio
The staggered launch sequence, the Month 3/6/9 pruning gates, capital allocation by contribution margin, a kill executed without renegotiation, the transferable asset pack, and the expansion test.
$199 · 6 lessons · 6 artifacts
What changed in v2, and why
Version 1 of this academy taught people to rank pages on Google. That advice is becoming less useful every quarter, and continuing to sell it would have been the easier commercial choice and the wrong one.
| v1 taught | v2 teaches |
|---|---|
| Rank pages on Google | Build assets that survive zero-click, AI-mediated discovery |
| 30 pages per site | A 12-asset MVP, with the tool and newsletter first |
| Launch 10 sites | Launch 3, prove them at three gates, then expand by one |
| Traffic and rankings as success | Return demand: retention, direct and branded arrivals, repeat tool use |
| Recall quizzes | Scenario assessments with uncomfortable decisions (>50% of assessment) |
| No exit condition | Kill criteria written before you are attached, enforced at Month 9 |