0:00Introduction
Lesson 0.3: the course tools.
0:04The tools
In this lesson we set up the tools we'll use throughout the course. They're all free. There are six: the AI assistants, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, a few technical checks, and the course worksheet.
0:201. The AI assistants
First: the AI assistants. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Claude; some of them need a free account. Google's AI answers you see simply by searching on Google. For clean measurements, one rule: a new chat every time, memory and personalization off, and always write down the date and the engine. Answers change from person to person, and from one day to the next. So a single answer tells you little: what counts is the picture across many questions, over time.
0:532. Google Search Console
Second: Google Search Console. It's free, and it tells you which searches your site shows up for on Google, with how many impressions and how many clicks. To connect it, you prove the site is yours: with a DNS record, which covers the whole domain, or with an HTML tag or a file, for one specific address. The searches people run on Google are a great starting point for choosing the questions to ask the AI engines. We'll use them in Module 2.
1:233. Bing Webmaster Tools
Third: Bing Webmaster Tools. It matters more than you'd think. Copilot is built on Bing. And in a Seer Interactive study from February 2025, 87% of ChatGPT search citations matched Bing's top results. That figure is more than a year old, but it tells you Bing is not something to ignore. If you already have Search Console, you can import your site from there, and it's verified automatically.
1:504. Google Analytics 4
Fourth: Google Analytics 4, or whatever analytics tool you already use. It shows you the visits that come from AI assistants, when an answer includes a link and the person clicks it. Not every visit leaves a trace. In Module 9 we'll see how to read this data with care.
2:085. Technical checks
Fifth: a few technical checks to keep in your bookmarks. Google's Rich Results Test, and the Schema Markup Validator, for structured data. PageSpeed Insights, for speed and technical issues on your pages. And a crawler: a program that visits your site the way a bot would. Screaming Frog, for example, crawls up to five hundred URLs in its free version.
2:336. The course worksheet
Finally, the course worksheet: one single file, with a tab for each task. Start here, the six steps, the questions, the manual audit, the external sources, the link plan, and the before-and-after comparison. You'll fill it in lesson by lesson. It works with Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice. The download link is below the video.
2:58Your task for today
Your task for today: connect your site to Search Console, import it into Bing Webmaster Tools, check that Analytics is recording visits, and download the worksheet. If something is already connected, even better: just check that you have access with your own account.
3:24Next lesson
That wraps up Module 0. In the next lesson: SEO, AEO and GEO, what really changes. That's where we get to the heart of it.