GEO course for vibe coders
The Katman course teaches you to get a site built with Cursor, Claude Code, Lovable, Bolt or v0 read, quoted and recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. It has 12 modules and a 6-step vibe-coder track; every lesson is done with a Katman MCP tool call and ends with an assignment you can check. The whole course is part of Katman Pro.
What you’ll learn
The course follows the method from the Katman book: research first, then build, then verify, and ask the same questions again 14 days later. Every public page has to pass three gates before an assistant can recommend it:
- Read. Bots reach the page and the text is in the server’s HTML. On our sample site, OpenAI’s search crawler read 176 distinct pages in the first week (own measurement, 21–27 September 2026).
- Quote. The first sentences answer the question on their own, and your one-sentence description is the same everywhere. ChatGPT repeated all four parts of the sample site’s sentence in two sessions on 28 September 2026 (own measurement).
- Fit. A page exists for the situation the customer describes. On the same site, 59% of the visitors ChatGPT sent landed on two situation pages (own measurement).
By the end you will have a research file, a first and a second measurement, a technically clean site that search engines have been told about, your first situation pages, and a plan for the next 60 days.
The 12 modules
| # | Module | What you do | Katman tools |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | How assistants answer | Learn where each assistant reads from; run your first 12 + 2 question measurement | katman_start, katman_research |
| 2 | Open the door: access and indexing | Check every AI bot through your robots.txt and CDN; tell Google, Bing, IndexNow and Brave | katman_audit_site, katman_generate |
| 3 | Is the text in the HTML? | Read your pages as a bot; fix rendering, head tags, sitemap and soft 404s | katman_scan_code, katman_audit_site |
| 4 | The customer’s sentence | Write 10–12 situation questions, your one sentence and your not-X note | katman_research, katman_keywords |
| 5 | Situation pages and free tools | Ship five situation pages and one free tool, at a pace Google accepts | katman_page_brief, katman_lint_content |
| 6 | Quotable evidence | Put a number, a source and a date on every claim; publish one piece of original data | katman_research, katman_lint_content |
| 7 | YouTube and short video | One video per situation, linked back to its page | katman_generate |
| 8 | Others mentioning you | Find the pages assistants cite and write to their authors | katman_visibility_run, katman_report |
| 9 | Community without spam | 30 days of disclosed, useful answers on Reddit, Hacker News and Indie Hackers | katman_manual_check |
| 10 | Entities and feeds | One set of facts on your site, profiles, feeds and schema | katman_generate, katman_research |
| 11 | Measurement | Count AI visitors and bots correctly and build a monthly dashboard | katman_visibility_run, katman_setup_monitoring, katman_sync |
| 12 | Risk, ads and agents | Stay clear of Google’s 2026 spam rules and make your site usable by agents | katman_audit_site, katman_report |
The vibe-coder track
Six short steps for sites built with Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit, Cursor or Claude Code. Start here if you aren’t sure your pages are visible to AI crawlers at all.
| Step | What you do |
|---|---|
| V1 | Test in one minute whether your app is blank to AI crawlers, and learn how your builder renders |
| V2 | Pick the smallest fix: server rendering, static generation or prerendering the same HTML |
| V3 | Give every route its own title, description, canonical and share card; add a sitemap and real 404s |
| V4 | Keep the public site outside the login wall; check your host and CDN |
| V5 | Brief your coding agent one page at a time, and make CI fail when the answer is missing |
| V6 | Launch: tell the indexes, then go where mentions come from |
Access and price
- Katman Pro: the whole course (every module and step), every Katman tool and the private community. The founding price is $29 a month or $290 a year for the first 100 customers; after that, Pro is $49 a month. Details are on the pricing page.
- Audit Week ($3, once, for 7 days) runs Katman’s audit and recommendation tools on your site. It doesn’t include the course.
- The book and the 30-day workbook are PDFs sold separately on the book page.
Visibility runs use your own OpenRouter key: about $2.4 per run on the default panel (range $1.2–3.7; Katman’s cost estimate), paid by you to OpenRouter, separately from Pro.
How the course uses the Katman MCP
Every lesson ends with a box called Do it with Katman: the exact tool calls to give your AI coding tool, with their arguments, and what to look for in the result. For example, module 2 checks whether AI bots get past your CDN with:
katman_audit_site {"site_url": "https://your-site.com", "include_bot_test": true}
Then comes an assignment with an acceptance criterion, such as “every search and user bot gets 200, and any 403 is written down as deliberate”. The criterion is what makes the work checkable: your coding tool doesn’t get to say “done” until the check passes. Katman is an MCP server that runs inside your editor; how to install it is on the Katman MCP page.
Where the numbers come from
Every number in the lessons has a source and a date next to it:
- Own measurement: our sample site’s analytics (human sessions only), our audits of katman.pro, and our own tests, each with its date.
- Third-party studies: named and dated, such as Ahrefs’ May 2026 study of what correlates with AI visibility. We haven’t verified them unless we say so.
- Google, Bing, OpenAI and Cloudflare documentation, read on the date given.
If the evidence is small, the lesson says so. Nobody can guarantee a place in an AI answer, and the course never claims otherwise.
How to start
- Get Katman Pro. The course opens in your account as soon as Pro starts.
- Install Katman in your AI coding tool with your Katman key, and ask it to run
katman_startwith your site’s address. - Begin with module 1, or with V1 if your site was built in Lovable, Bolt, v0 or Replit.
New to the topic? What is GEO? explains the difference between SEO and GEO in ten minutes.
Who this is not for
- Anyone who wants someone else to do the work: Katman is software, and the course is for people who make the changes themselves or with their AI coding tool.
- Large sites with an in-house SEO team: the course is written for small sites built with AI tools.
- Readers looking for ranking tricks, bought links or fake reviews: the lessons argue against all three.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get the course?
With Katman Pro: $29 a month at the founding price for the first 100 customers, or $290 a year; later $49 a month. Pro includes the whole course, every Katman tool and the community. Audit Week doesn’t include the course.
What do I need to follow it?
A site you can change, an AI coding tool that runs MCP servers (Cursor, Claude Code, VS Code, Windsurf, Codex CLI or Gemini CLI) and a terminal. If you build in Lovable, Bolt or v0, sync the project to GitHub and open it in one of those tools.
How long does it take?
Each lesson takes 5 to 15 minutes to read, plus the assignment. The course follows the book’s 30-day plan: research and a first measurement in week 1, technical fixes in week 2, situation pages in week 3, measurement and mentions in week 4.
Are there videos?
Not yet. Every lesson is written, with the exact commands and Katman tool calls to copy, so you can work through it at your desk.
Do I have to use Katman to follow the lessons?
No. Every lesson explains the work in plain terms, and most assignments can be done by hand. Katman makes it faster and checks each acceptance criterion for you.
Where do the numbers in the lessons come from?
From the Katman book, our own measurements (labelled “own measurement”, with dates) and third-party studies (named and dated, and never verified by us unless we say so). Our main example is an AI-powered consumer web app we launched on 21 September 2026; it’s our own product, not a client.
Will the course get my site recommended by ChatGPT?
Nobody can promise that. The course shows you what to fix, how to check it and how to measure what the assistants say, with dates, before and after.