As of September 2026, the whole thing is published. Eight lessons, a 90-day checklist, a ten-term glossary and thirty supporting guides, all open, all free, with no account and no email capture anywhere on the site.
This post explains what is in it, who it is for, and the two commercial relationships behind it.
What is published
The course covers how AI search finds, reads and cites a local business, and what an owner can do about it. The eight lessons run in order:
- How AI Search Picks Local Businesses, the retrieval mechanics everything else depends on.
- Google Business Profile for AI Search, the single most-read record of your facts.
- Local Site Content AI Can Cite, the page shapes that get quoted.
- Schema and Structured Data, with a JSON-LD block you can paste and validate.
- Build a Local Site AI Can Find, the technical floor crawlers need.
- Reviews, Mentions and Citations, the off-site signals assistants repeat.
- Measure Your AI Search Visibility, including what cannot be measured yet.
- Where to Go Next, an honest account of where foundation level stops.
Alongside them: the 90-day checklist, which sequences every task into three months with a definition of done for each, and the glossary, which defines the ten terms that keep coming up.
Reading time is roughly 80 minutes for the lessons. Doing the work takes a quarter, which is why the checklist exists.
Free means free
There is no paywall, no gated PDF and no signup form. If you want to read Lesson 4 at two in the morning without telling us who you are, that is the intended experience.
Who it is for, and who it is not
It is written for the owner or manager of a single-location or small multi-location service business, a trade, a clinic, a salon, a restaurant, a professional practice, who already has a website or a Google Business Profile and wants to show up when someone asks an assistant for a recommendation. It is also written for the freelance and small-agency SEOs who look after those businesses and want a repeatable checklist.
It is not written for enterprise SEO teams, affiliate operations or rank-and-rent portfolios. Those readers will find it too basic, and Lesson 8 says so plainly and points them to AI SEO Rainmakers instead.
The disclosures
Two commercial relationships exist, and both appear on the pages where they come up rather than buried in a footer.
LocusPilot publishes this course. LocusPilot is an AI website builder for local businesses, and it is used as a worked example in Lesson 5, which covers the technical baseline a site needs. The lesson states this where the example appears.
The AI SEO Rainmakers link is a referral link. AI SEO Rainmakers is a paid community run by Charles Floate, hosted on Skool. The link on the homepage and in Lesson 8 is a Skool referral link. It is there because some readers genuinely outgrow foundation-level material, not because it pays.
Nothing else on the site is sponsored. No SEO software vendor pays for a mention, and no tool is recommended in exchange for payment. The editorial policy sets out the standard in full, including how every figure is sourced and dated and how corrections are handled.
Where the material comes from
Since December 2025, LocusPilot has built more than 200 local business sites. The lessons come from what those builds, and their Google Search Console data, actually show about how AI search treats small local entities. Where the evidence was thin, the lessons say so instead of guessing confidently. Lesson 7 in particular spends most of its length on what cannot be measured reliably today.
Start here
If you are new to all of this, start with Lesson 1. It explains how an assistant assembles a recommendation, which makes every later lesson make sense rather than feel like an arbitrary checklist.
If you would rather have the plan than the theory, open the 90-day checklist and run the baseline prompt test in week one. Either way, the curriculum is maintained: revisions are dated on the changelog, and the whole thing is reviewed at least monthly.
Start with the mechanics — Read Lesson 1: How AI Search Picks Local Businesses
