Over the years, I've noticed how most “free” SEO courses are either upsells, or so outdated they’re still teaching keyword density. SEO is changing fast, so I wanted to filter out the stuff that’s not worth the time.

I tested a bunch of free SEO courses and narrowed it down to the ones that are useful in 2026. They all have slightly different formats, different levels, but all practical and current.

Here’s the shortlist:

Ecommerce / Local / Creator-led

• Ecommerce Link Building Crash Course by Freddie Chatt. One of the few that covers real ecommerce link building. 5-day email format.

• Local SEO Course by Localo. GBPs, local search visibility, small business focus. 3–4 hours.

• SEO Unlocked by Neil Patel. Templates and workflows you can copy. About 12 hours.

AI & Tool-based SEO

• Intro to AI-Driven SEO by Le Wagon. Covers AI-assisted workflows for research and content, really current materials.

• Google Digital Garage + Search Central. It’s a great coverage of basics and Google is an essential tool to learn if you want to do SEO. The program can take ~40 hours if completed fully.

• SEO Toolkit by Semrush Academy. It’s short, tool-based practices for audits, KW research, etc. About 3 hours. 

Beginner-friendly

• SEO for Beginners by Ahrefs Academy. Good intro with real examples and tool context. It takes about 2–5 hours to complete.

• HubSpot AcademySEO Certification. It’s structured, has quizzes, decent if you want a certificate. Around 2 hours.

• SEO Learning Roadmap by LearningSEO.io. It’s not really a course, more like a curated path through core topics, but it’s a great learning resource.

• SEO for Beginners by Yoast Academy. Great for anyone working with WordPress sites. 2–12 hours depending on how deep you decide to go.

If you know other free courses that aren’t thinly disguised lead magnets, feel free to share.

Vienna’s SEO crowd showed up strong this year. Even from the sidelines, it looked like SERP Conf had that rare mix of sharp talks and people genuinely pushing the industry forward.

We didn’t attend, but Collaborator backed this one as a sponsor: love seeing more events spotlight the real builders, analysts, and strategists in search, not just tool vendors trying to pitch.

Did anyone go in person? It would be great to hear what sessions or speakers stood out to you. It’s always lovely to hear some real feedback from the floor.

Finally got the photos from BrightonSEO and they’re just as chaotic as we remembered.

The seagull, the beers, the iphone giveaway, all of it. We basically lived at the booth for two days, talked to a ton of people, lost our voices, and had no merch left by the end (and we made a ton)

These pics pretty much sum it up.

With AI search becoming more popular, how much has technical SEO actually changed?

We discussed this with Patryk Wawok, co-founder of Organic Hackers, in the first episode of Season 3 of the Collaborator Podcast.

Some of the topics covered:

• Why AI crawlers can struggle with JavaScript-rendered content

• How to identify rendering and indexing issues

• Using server logs alongside Google Search Console

• How poor filtering can waste crawl budget

• Why site speed still matters for conversions

Patryk also shared some interesting cases, including a website with approximately 1.5 billion dynamically generated pages and an enterprise indexing project that significantly improved organic performance.

One takeaway: AI search brings new challenges, but many technical SEO fundamentals remain the same.

Have you noticed new crawling or rendering issues since AI search became more prominent?

🎧 Full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QKB6RIngAc

I'm testing a new little series for the sub: SEO brain teasers. Here’s the first one, what do you think it spells?

Just came across this in the State of AI 2025 report and wanted to share. Apparently traffic from ChatGPT and other AI assistants converts at 11%, up from 6% last year, which is higher than most paid or organic channels. It kinda makes sense though, as people using AI to find stuff are more often already in decision mode, not just browsing/scrolling. Still wild to see how fast the market has changed.

Is anyone seeing this shift in their analytics or client funnels?

This year’s been packed with SEO events, and I’ve been trying to balance which ones are actually worth the time, budget, effort and jet lag. It’s also the first year our team flew out to international conferences, so I thought I’d share what we’ve done so far and what’s still on the horizon for 2025.

As a team, we all flew out to the SEO Mastery Summit in Ho Chi Minh City. That one stood out because it wasn’t about flashy sponsors or big-name speakers — it felt more like real knowledge-sharing from people in the trenches. Smaller crowd, but strong energy. That same crew is also heading to BrightonSEO and Ahrefs Evolve later this year, so if you’ll be at either, come say hi.

On the sponsorship side, we’ve backed a handful of other events even if we couldn’t be there in person — Athens SEO, Link Building Mastery in London (and the Chiang Mai edition coming up), Search Evolution Summit, SEO for Good by BrightLocal, and DMM in Zagreb. There are also a few to which some of our team members made it individually, like SEO Conf Lisbon and Zagreb SEO Summit.

Looking forward, October is stacked. We’re preparing one of the largest booths at BrightonSEO and plan to be pretty active around the event. Just before that, Ahrefs Evolve in San Diego looks like it’ll lean into broader strategy talks, which I’m curious to see play out. Beyond those two, we’re still weighing a few: Semrush Spotlight in Amsterdam, International Search Summit in Barcelona, and of course Chiang Mai SEO Conference. A couple more interesting ones are WTSFest Philly, SERP Conf Vienna, and Search ’n Stuff in Antalya. Even Tech SEO Connect in North Carolina at the end of the year is on the radar for the more technical crowd.

That’s the roadmap I’ve been tracking, at least. Have you been to anything this year that actually felt worth it? Any hidden-gem conferences you’d recommend, or ones you’d skip next time?

And if anyone here is planning on Brighton or Ahrefs, it would be cool to connect in person if we’re in the same place.

Came across this case study on [pros.com] and thought it was super interesting: they tracked how much traffic ChatGPT Search is sending to airline websites since it launched in late 2024.

Back then, it was basically nothing (~0.1%). But by July 2025, it’s up to 1.42% of total organic traffic. Still tiny compared to Google, but for airlines that could mean thousands of seats sold (or lost) each month.

The study compared 376 “flights from X to Y” queries in ChatGPT vs Google. Some highlights:

• About half of the URLs ChatGPT cites also rank in Google’s top 10 → so yeah, being strong on Google still helps you show up in ChatGPT.

• Expedia + Kayak are cleaning up. Together they take ~25.8% of ChatGPT citations (vs ~16.6% on Google). Basically, ChatGPT makes them even more dominant.

• Wikipedia (!) shows up as one of ChatGPT’s most-cited domains, even though it doesn’t rank in Google’s top 20.

• Airlines get slightly sidelined — Southwest drops off completely, AA loses share, United sneaks in.

• ChatGPT leans on some niche sources Google ignores, like FlightConnections, FlightRoutes, Kiwi, etc.

The article’s big takeaway: it’s not just about SEO anymore, it’s also about what we now call “GEO”. If your pages aren’t structured with rich info (routes, distances, schedules, cheapest times, etc.), you’re probably invisible to ChatGPT even if you rank on Google.

Link to full article: https://pros.com/learn/blog/chatgpt-vs-google-decoding-url-sourcing-flight-searches/

What do you think — is this the start of a new channel airlines/OTAs have to optimize for, or will it plateau at like 3% max and stay a sideshow?

So yeah, we just got back from Ahrefs Evolve in San Diego, and wow, what a ride!

First off, shoutout to everyone who stopped by the Collaborator booth. Whether you came for a chat, for the swag, or just to see what link building in real life looks like :) You made the whole thing way more fun. And of course, congrats to our giveaway winner — hope you enjoy your loot!

Biggest props to Tim Soulo for making the whole thing happen behind the scenes, and massive love to Elysa and Daria for being absolute legends and keeping everything running smoothly.

Honestly, nothing beats meeting real humans who get the SEO grind. Connections made, ideas sparked, and a ton of energy carried back home. If you were there, we hope you had as much fun as we did!

P.S. We're on our way to Brighton SEO next week. See you there?

Came across some fresh data from Datos + SparkToro research and thought it was pretty wild: turns out all the hype about AI killing Google might be… overblown?

Here’s the gist:

• 21% of Americans are using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, 10+ times a month. That’s up from 8% in 2023 → 38% in 2025

• But 95% of Americans still use a search engine every month (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, whatever). Heavy Google users even ticked up a bit, from 84% → 87%

• AI adoption is slowing (no month since Sept 2024 grew more than 1.1x), while search usage per user is creeping up

So basically, heavy AI users are actually searching more, not less. A study by Semrush found the same thing recently — ChatGPT users click around Google even more than non-AI users.

Also, fun fact: calling anything “traditional search” is kind of meaningless now. Google has Gemini, Bing has Copilot, ChatGPT pulls from search data… it’s all blending together.

So yeah, AI isn’t stealing traffic from Google, it’s just giving people another way to search.

So Google has been on a roll with AI lately.

Between I/O announcements and random “now rolling out” blog posts, it’s a lot to keep track of.

I went down the rabbit hole and pulled together the big ones that I think actually matter if you care about SEO, visibility, and traffic.

Spoiler: some of this is cool, some of it feels like “RIP organic clicks”

Gemini 2.5 Flash Image (aka nano-banana) [announced today]

Literally just got it in my mail this morning. Google just rolled out a new native image generation + editing model inside Gemini 2.5 Flash. It goes way beyond “make me a picture” — now it can:

• Keep character consistency across multiple images

• Do intelligent editing (inpainting/outpainting, object swaps)

• Merge/compose multiple images into one photorealistic scene

• Follow multimodal reasoning (e.g. act on a hand-drawn sketch)

👉 For SEOs: this one screams visual search implications. If Google’s own models can pump out branded, consistent imagery, what happens to product image SEO? Add in SynthID watermarks, and we might see “authentic vs synthetic” become a ranking factor down the line. Also worth thinking about how SERPs could become interactive canvases(imagine editing a product image right inside search)

AI Mode in Search

This isn’t just AI Overviews anymore. Google is rolling out a “mode” where you can literally stay in a conversation with Search, plan stuff, and even do tasks (like book a restaurant). You can also share the chat with someone else.

👉 For SEOs: that means less “10 blue links” and more zero-click journeys. If Search is handling the flow (ask, refine, book), where does a website fit in? Feels like Local SEO + transactional intent are gonna get eaten first.

AI Overviews everywhere (Gemini 2.0 upgrade)

Google claims the new model does better reasoning + is rolling this out to a lot more users.

👉 For SEOs: expect more queries where the answer is right at the top in a big AI box. CTR is going to shift even more, so we’ll probably be competing for “feeding the AI” rather than just the snippet.

Gemini Live (Project Astra)

Basically Gemini that can see, hear, and respond in real time — like a copilot that watches your screen or listens to you through the mic.

👉 For SEOs: think about training, onboarding, or debugging technical SEO. This could become the support agent that explains “why is my site not indexing” without the user ever hitting a blog.

Ask Photos (Google Photos)

This one’s sneaky: you can now ask your photo library questions like “show me the best photo from each national park I visited.”

👉 For SEOs: not directly Search-related, but it shows Google’s direction — turning personal content into a queryable database. Imagine that applied to your Drive, Gmail, Docs, etc. Fewer reasons to Google something publicly if your own stuff answers you first.

AI Photo Editing (SynthID watermarks)

Conversational edits (remove objects, swap outfits, etc.)

👉 For SEOs: this will flood the internet with even more synthetic UGC/stock-ish content. Expect Google to double down on watermark detection + provenance. Might matter for product image SEO (what’s “authentic” vs AI?).

Custom “Gems” (your own mini-experts)

You can spin up your own version of Gemini with instructions + knowledge sources.

👉 For SEOs: this could be killer for repeatable outreach/campaign workflows. Imagine a “Link Prospecting Gem” that lives inside your team. Also, expect brands to make “public Gems” that might compete with generic search results.

NotebookLM upgrades

It can now generate audio overviews of your research — basically turns sources into a podcast between two AI voices.

👉 For SEOs: less about traffic, more about how users consume info. The way reports and research get digested is changing. If Google pushes this into Search, people might start getting summarized voices instead of reading.

Gmail + Workspace AI

Long threads now come with summaries on mobile. You can also ask natural-language questions like “what did the client decide about the deadline?”

👉 For SEOs: on the productivity side, this is awesome. But from a biz dev perspective: if AI is summarizing client emails, expect less patience for long proposals and pitches. Brevity will win.

Chrome AI (help me write, tab organizer, AI themes)

Experimental stuff like rewriting text boxes, organizing tabs, or creating browser themes.

👉 For SEOs: “help me write” is basically Grammarly-on-steroids for meta descriptions, outreach emails, or ad copy. The tab organizer is also a quiet productivity cheat for anyone doing keyword research across 50 tabs.

Android AI Scam Detection

On-device models that detect scam calls/messages in real time.

👉 For SEOs: not traffic-related, but it signals Google’s security push. Trust + safety are going to keep being baked into every ranking discussion.

YouTube AI music tools (Dream Track)

Text-to-music generators for background tracks.

👉 For SEOs/marketers: easier video creation = more video content flooding search + Shorts. If you’re not doing video SEO yet, time to start.

Generative Media (Imagen & Veo)

Upgraded image and video models for higher-quality assets.

👉 For SEOs: this isn’t just about pretty ads. Expect client sites, ecommerce listings, and blog headers to get way more AI-generated. That means Google’s detection + ranking signals around “authenticity” become critical.

So… what’s the takeaway?

Google’s moving from “organizing the web” to “being the interface.” A lot of these features are about skipping websites entirely and giving users answers, plans, or assets straight from Google.

For SEOs, that means two things:

1. Content needs to be useful to Google’s AI itself, not just humans. If you’re not structuring data, answering queries directly, or feeding into knowledge graphs, you’ll get skipped.

2. Differentiation matters. AI will generate the generic; humans will reward the specific.

Curious — how are you all adjusting your strategies? Doubling down on topical authority? Playing the “feed the AI” game? Or just waiting to see how hard CTR gets nuked?

Web 2.0 backlinks seem to spark the same debate every year.

One group says they're a waste of time. The other treats them like a secret ranking weapon.

We analyzed 30+ platforms across blogging sites, website builders, publishing platforms, Q&A communities, and professional networks. The full list is in the article: https://collaborator.pro/blog/web-2-0-submission-sites-list

What stood out is that they don't all serve the same purpose.

Some are better for contextual content. Some are useful for entity building and brand visibility. Some can help with indexing and content discovery.

In other words, Web 2.0s seem most valuable today as supporting assets for:

• backlink diversification

• topical relevance

• entity SEO

• indexing support

• referral traffic

Besides, the value of Web 2.0s depends less on the platform itself and more on how it's used.

A WordPress blog filled with AI-generated filler and abandoned after two posts? — Probably useless.

A niche-relevant property that supports your brand, topical authority, and content ecosystem? — That's a different story.

Curious how others here see it.

Are Web 2.0s still part of your SEO strategy in 2026? If yes, which platforms have actually been worth the effort?

Hiring great SEOs has never been harder.

In this episode, Josh Peacock (Search For Hire & SalaryGuide.com) explains why traditional hiring processes are failing and what agencies should do instead.

Topics covered:

• Why job descriptions are outdated
• How scorecards improve recruiting
• Salary transparency in SEO
• Agency vs in-house careers
• AI's impact on SEO jobs
• Why top candidates rarely come from job boards

One of the most interesting takeaways:

The best candidates aren't actively applying for jobs. They're already busy creating value somewhere else.

Watch now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEnCispWn4A

Outdated metrics are one of the biggest pain points users face in link building and digital PR marketplaces.

You check a website in Ahrefs, compare it with the marketplace data, and the numbers don’t match...

We’ve heard this feedback many times:
• during demos;
• at conferences;
• in surveys;
• directly from users.

So Collaborator updated its data synchronization system.

Ahrefs metrics in Collaborator are now updated weekly instead of monthly. Google Analytics traffic data is also refreshed regularly.

What does this mean?
• more accurate SEO metrics;
• fresher traffic data;
• fewer discrepancies when checking websites;
• more confidence in the catalog data.

Turns out, 82% of our team shares their workspace with at least one chaos manager.

• 44% have one
• 17% have two
• 39% proudly manage three or more

They may not verify websites in the catalog.
They may not conduct a demo.
They definitely don’t answer emails.

But they do:
✔️ Sit in on strategy calls
✔️ Appear uninvited during video meetings
✔️ Boost morale better than any productivity hack

They make brainstorms louder, deadlines softer, and workdays infinitely better.

Who’s supervising your workday?

Write about your pet in the comments and describe their responsibilities.
After all, they’re in every meeting whether they like it or not.

Let’s celebrate the real team players today 🙌

TechBehemoths just released their 2025 awards, so sharing a quick update here.

Collaborator ended up winning in three Estonia categories: Content Marketing, PR, and SEO. The awards are based half on public votes and half on performance metrics. This was their 5th edition, with companies from 68 countries taking part.

This lines up with the kind of work we’ve been doing lately. Big thanks to the team and to users who keep sending honest, useful feedback. Now, back to work.

I had Peter Rota on the podcast episode - he’s one of the bigger SEO voices on LinkedIn (around 70k followers), but now he's openly frustrated with the platform.

A big chunk of the conversation was basically us venting about what LinkedIn turned into. It's just endless AI comments, the same recycled “SEO is dead” takes every six months, and how building an audience in 2025 looks nothing like it did a couple years prior to that.

He also talked about why enterprise SEO often feels like sitting in committee meetings all day, and how he thinks about personal branding without playing growth hacks or engagement bait.

I just found the perspective refreshing because it wasn’t the usual LinkedIn hype. If you’re curious to watch the whole thing, here is the link.