What changed on the platform

Every lesson now has at least 12 practice questions, plus 70 new hands-on tasks (put steps in order, fix the code, work out the number). Duplicate questions were removed and answer choices now appear in a new order each time.

New note on the shared AI training control Google will support in robots.txt from early 2027, the October 2026 monthly recap and quiz, and three new documentation changes: the multi-country filter in Search Console, user-generated spam guidance and the common crawlers page.

New note on the extra links and source sections in AI Mode and AI Overviews (15 October), plus three documentation changes: hyphens in URLs, controlling what you share with Search, and the Indexing API quota page.

Two new plays in every category, including soft 404 cleanup, crawlable pagination, Business Profile suspension appeals, review removal workflow, GA4 data hygiene, year-on-year baselines and fixing wrong facts AI tools say about your brand.

Three new families (Changes you made, Local and Maps, Other Google surfaces), 20 new traffic patterns with full diagnoses, 18 new challenge cases and a diagnosis assistant that now covers Business Profile, Discover, Images, Video, News, device and country splits. The challenge now picks 12 cases at random each round.

Solve them yourself: deleted product pages, a redesign with no redirects, a hacked site, a syndication partner outranking the original, a service-area Business Profile, expired job pages, search intent on service pages, orphan pages, a structured data manual action, and Google Images and Discover traffic.

New click-to-do walkthroughs on real-looking tool screens: HTTPS report, Removals, Breadcrumbs structured data report and Change of address in Search Console, Business Profile updates, layout shift (CLS) in PageSpeed Insights, canonical tags in Screaming Frog, search volume in Keyword Planner and comparing topics in Google Trends.

Each one was checked to make sure a free account can publish a page, profile or post with a clickable link to your website, including Unsplash, Pexels, Patreon, Chess.com, Lichess, Goodreads, Drupal.org, Eventbrite, Figma Community and sites in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, French and Portuguese.

The Backlink directory gains 21 sites with a confirmed link type (website builders, static hosts and open communities) and the Citation directory gains 88 checked business listing sites across the US, UK, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, UAE, Singapore and global.

Bite-size animated videos (under a minute, very light to load) at the top of the core lessons, plus 30-second explainers for Graph Lab patterns, Google ranking systems, spam policies and tool walkthroughs.

The September 2026 spam update finished rolling out on 8 October. New documentation note on the UGC Fresh Data Program.

4 click-by-click Screaming Frog guides: your first crawl, finding broken links, fixing titles and meta descriptions, and exporting internal links.

43 ready-to-use AI prompts for SEO work in 8 categories. Fill in your details once and copy a finished prompt.

Content SEO (10 lessons), E-commerce SEO (8 lessons) and Discover, News and programmatic SEO (6 lessons), each with practice questions, flashcards, a project and a badge. Plus 37 new glossary terms.

An interactive timeline of every confirmed Google ranking update since 2021, 38 detailed update notes with infographics and recovery checklists, a "Was I hit?" tool that overlays updates on your own Search Console data, a monthly digest of Google documentation changes and a monthly recap quiz. Lessons, questions and Strategy Vault now reflect that FAQ rich results were retired in May 2026.

Every interview question now has a 30-second answer, how to structure it, what is under the hood, a real-work example, a weak answer to avoid and the follow-up answer. New: a timed mock interview with a scored report, 20 practical tasks on real tool screens, revision sheets, role plans and a career kit.

All 20 niche playbooks rebuilt with search seasonality, intent mix, a drawn results page, keyword volume and difficulty, schema examples, an example six-month result, a 90-day plan you can tick off and a quick check.

Find the right play for your situation, track every strategy on your own board, apply it one step at a time with notes, record before and after results, and download your playbook.

New quick check, skill area check, hands-on check on real tool screens, lightning round and mistake retry, plus a certificate readiness score, score trends, badges and a full results breakdown with time analysis and next steps.

27 traffic patterns in 5 families, each with a full diagnosis, a diagnosis assistant that narrows down your own graph, and a 12-case graph challenge.

A daily set of 10 picked from your mistakes and weakest area, difficulty that adapts as you answer, confidence scoring, a mistake notebook and 130+ new hands-on questions: tap the problem on a real tool screen, fix the code, put steps in order and work out the numbers.

Every ranking system Google has confirmed (RankBrain, BERT, MUM, reviews, links and PageRank, SpamBrain and more), all 16 spam policies, how violations are handled and a timeline of confirmed updates, each explained with its own infographic, plus a quiz.

A bonus vault of 110 named SEO plays across 10 areas, each with the logic, a step-by-step process, free tools only, how to measure success and pitfalls to avoid.

How to do SEO for 20 niches, including restaurants, clinics, real estate, e-commerce, SaaS and lawyers, with search journeys, what matters most, pages to build, keywords and a 90-day plan.

100 real SEO interview questions with model answers, a timed mock interview mode and 30 "client asks X, how do you reply?" scenarios.

Learn to read 12 Search Console and GA4 traffic shapes (normal, needs a look, or a real problem) with causes, how to confirm and what to do, plus a scored "Diagnose it" quiz.

7 lessons on ranking in AI answers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews): how AI picks sources, entity SEO, quotable writing, AI crawler control, llms.txt, measuring AI traffic and brand mentions. Plus a 40+ card GEO deck, 20 new questions, 5 AI visibility case studies and a new AI search tag in Google updates.

Real-world style SEO case studies with charts, audit findings, step-by-step timelines and decision checkpoints.

Notes, flashcards and questions for the March 2026 core, May 2026 core, August 2026 spam and September 2026 spam updates.

28 lessons with infographics, 198 practice questions, 180 flashcards, 8 tool walkthroughs and 6 case labs.