“It’s rare to find a partner who’s this technically deep and this awesome to work with.”
Katie Lemon
AI SEO Content Manager, CourseCareers
Introduction
Company Overview
CourseCareers is a budget-friendly EdTech platform that helps people break into roles across tech, business, construction, and supply chain without a degree. It delivers self-paced, practical courses, free intros, and optional coaching. They’re heavily focused on job-ready skills and provide a straightforward alternative to bootcamps with a strong “learn, build, apply” vibe.
CourseCareers needed to translate their program offerings into a single, trusted, machine-readable identity that AI systems could retrieve at scale.
Challenge
CourseCareers had built a strong direct-response engine and a clear mission to open high-paying, no-degree career paths through affordable, self-paced training. Yet they were largely ignoring the fast-emerging channel of AI Search, where prospective students increasingly ask models like ChatGPT which programs to trust. As a modern education company with programs spanning tech, supply chain, construction, and business, this blind spot risked ceding mindshare to louder competitors at the very moment their target customer was shifting upstream into conversational answers.
Early signals made the change impossible to ignore. After a handful of new signups explicitly credited ChatGPT, Founder and CEO Troy Buckholdt read the writing on the wall:
if CourseCareers wasn’t consistently showing up inside AI systems, they would lose visibility at the discovery stage, where intent is formed and buyers create shortlists.
He needed a proactive plan to show up accurately and authoritatively wherever models summarized “best tech sales courses” or “how to break into supply chain without a degree.” Growth Marshal was hired to plug this gap.
Growth Marshal focused on three things: make their identity crystal clear to AI, turn their best pages into “default answers” inside ChatGPT, and keep those wins durable as they scaled.
Solution
1) Set a foundation of trust.
We deployed Trust Stack™ to give AI models one clean, consistent version of “who CourseCareers is and what they offer.” In plain English: we organized their facts, verified key people, and created a single source of truth that answer engines can reference without guesswork. This reduced misattribution and made it more likely that CourseCareers would get selected and cited.
2) Engineered “zero-click” presence.
Next, we applied our Zero Click™ framework to CourseCareers’ highest-intent content. We clarified language, tightened headings and FAQs, and re-framed copy so each section reads like a precise, ready-to-cite answer. The goal wasn’t just more traffic; it was to be the answer when prospects ask models things like “best tech sales course” or “how to become an electrician.”
3) Aligned proof with how AI evaluates credibility.
We reinforced pages with the kinds of authority signals AI retrievers look for: clear claims backed by evidence, unambiguous program descriptions, and consistent references to the same organization and people. This helped models recognize CourseCareers as the authoritative source rather than a similar-sounding alternative.
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CourseCareers
Troy Buckholdt
Katie Lemon, AI SEO Lead
Online Education
>9K
coursecareers.com
Check out @coursecareers on
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“Growth Marshal thinks about AI-optimized content strategy on a completely different level. They helped us create the core framework and schema that power everything we do now.”
CourseCareers increased month-over-month student signups by 2x and captured a nice 112% bump in AI traffic.
Results
Once Trust Stack™ set the foundation and Zero Click™ aligned key pages to how LLMs generate answers, paid enrollments doubled. The lift came from showing up earlier in the decision cycle and earning trust faster.
CourseCareers also saw a 112% increase in sessions originating from AI surfaces like ChatGPT-style answers and AI summaries. More prospects discovered CourseCareers at the “what should I choose?” moment, instead of a long search journey.
“What stands out is Growth Marshal’s technical approach to AI Search. They’ve got this down to a science and have been a rock-solid partner.”