AI Search & AEO: A Free AI SEO Course in 6 Lessons

AI Search & AEO is a free AI SEO course that teaches you, in six lessons and about 90 minutes, how to get your business cited by ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. You will learn how AI assistants choose their sources, what answer engine optimization (AEO) changes about classic SEO, and how to measure your own AI visibility. No signup, no paywall.

This is the newest course in the academy because the behavior is new: buyers now ask AI assistants for recommendations and act on the answer without ever seeing a results page. The businesses those assistants name win by default. This course is built from the same AEO work we run for clients, the kind of structured, answer-first content that earns LiveHelpNow an extra 3,000 organic visits a month and citations in AI Overviews.

Curriculum

1. How will ChatGPT affect SEO? You will learn how AI assistants change search behavior and which parts of classic SEO still matter.
2. Answer engine optimization explained You will learn what AEO is, how it differs from SEO, and the content structure AI engines cite.
3. How to rank on ChatGPT You will learn the specific signals that get a business named in ChatGPT answers, step by step.
4. The AI Search Manual You will learn the complete system in one free downloadable manual, the course's reference text.
5. Check your AI visibility Hands-on: you will score how visible your business is in AI answers right now and get a baseline to improve.
6. AI search optimization services You will learn what done-for-you AEO involves, so you know when to keep going solo and when to get help.

After the course

After these six lessons you can make your site citable: answer-first pages, quotable definitions, and the structural signals AI engines reward. You will have a measured AI visibility baseline from the checker, a prioritized list of pages to restructure, and the manual on hand for every format decision. Most competitors have not started this work, which is exactly why now is the cheap moment to do it. The skills also reinforce classic SEO, since the same clear structure that earns AI citations tends to win featured snippets too.

How AI assistants choose what to cite

Before the lessons go deep, it helps to see the pattern they all build toward. An AI assistant does not rank ten links and hand you the list. It reads a set of sources it already trusts, pulls the cleanest answer it can find, and names a few brands in a sentence or two. Getting picked is less about a single keyword and more about being the easiest source to lift and the safest source to quote.

Across the six lessons you will keep meeting the same handful of signals that decide that. They are worth naming up front so each lesson clicks into place:

• Answer-first structure. The direct answer sits in the first line or two of a section, not buried under setup, so the engine can extract it without guessing.
• Quotable definitions. Short, self-contained statements that read cleanly when pulled out of the page and dropped into an answer.
• Entity clarity. Consistent naming plus schema (FAQPage, Article, Organization) so the model resolves who you are and what you sell without ambiguity.
• Third-party corroboration. Mentions on the roundups, comparison pages, and publications the engine already cites for your topic, which is the trust layer keywords cannot fake.
• Topical depth. Complete coverage of a subject so your site reads as a definitive source rather than a single thin page.

This is not guesswork dressed up as method. The original generative engine optimization study by Aggarwal and colleagues, accepted to KDD 2024, tested optimization methods across thousands of queries and found they can lift a source's visibility inside AI answers by up to 40%. The course turns that finding into a checklist you can apply page by page.

Why AI search matters now

The reason this course exists, and the reason it is worth ninety minutes, is that buyer attention is moving into surfaces where being cited is the only way to be seen. A few numbers from named sources make the shift concrete:

• Reach. Google has said its AI Overviews reach more than 1.5 billion users a month across over 100 countries, so AI answers are now a mainstream surface, not a niche one.
• Scale of assistants. OpenAI reported ChatGPT at around 800 million weekly active users in late 2025, which is a vast pool of buyers asking for recommendations directly.
• Behavior change. Gartner predicted in 2024 that traditional search volume could fall about 25% by 2026 as users shift to AI assistants and answer engines.
• The citation gap. Brandlight found the overlap between Google's top organic results and the sources AI engines cite fell from about 70% to under 20% in roughly a year, so ranking no longer guarantees you get quoted.
• Click impact. Ahrefs found that the presence of an AI Overview correlated with roughly 34.5% lower click-through rate for the top organic result, which is why appearing inside the answer matters more each quarter.

None of this retires classic SEO. BrightEdge reports organic search still drives about 53% of all website traffic, and the authoritative pages that rank are usually the same ones AI engines cite. The course treats AEO as a layer on top of solid SEO, not a replacement for it.

AEO vs traditional SEO at a glance

The fastest way to understand what this course adds is to set it beside the SEO you may already know. They share a foundation and then diverge on what they optimize for.

Read down the right column and you have a preview of the whole course. Each lesson takes one of those rows and shows you how to actually do it.

Who this free AI SEO course is for

The course is written for people who need results, not theory. It fits best if you are one of these:

• Founders and marketers who keep hearing that buyers ask ChatGPT for recommendations and want to know whether their own brand shows up.
• SEO practitioners who are strong on rankings and want to add the answer-first and entity work that earns AI citations.
• Local and small business owners competing for a handful of high-intent questions, where focused work can win citations fast.
• Agencies and freelancers who want a shared, no-fluff reference to bring clients up to speed before a project starts.

You do not need a technical background. Where a lesson borrows a term from classic SEO, it explains it on the spot, and the SEO Foundations course is there if you want the groundwork first.

Frequently asked questions

Is AI search optimization different from normal SEO? It overlaps but is not identical. AEO keeps SEO's foundation of authority and crawlability, then adds answer-first structure, quotable definitions, and entity clarity so AI engines can lift and cite your content. Strong SEO without AEO leaves you ranked but unquoted.

Do I need the other academy courses first? No. The course explains what it borrows from classic SEO as it goes. That said, if terms like keywords and backlinks are new to you, taking SEO Foundations first will make every lesson here land faster.

How long does the AI Search and AEO course take? About 90 minutes across six self-paced lessons. You can read it in one sitting or work through one lesson at a time, and the linked AI Search Manual stays available as a reference whenever you need it later.

Is the course really free? Yes. There is no signup, no email gate, and no paywall. Every lesson links to a public page on this site, and the AI visibility checker is free to run on your own domain.

Which AI engines does the course cover? It focuses on the engines buyers actually use to ask for recommendations: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity, with the same principles applying to Gemini, Claude, and Copilot. The signals that earn a citation are largely shared across all of them.

Want to know where you stand before lesson one? Start with a free local SEO audit, and we will flag the gaps that hurt you in both Google and AI answers.