1. AI SEO Rainmakers
2. Charles Floate

Charles Floate: Skool, Courses and 18 Years of SEO

By AISEORainmaker.com Editorial TeamPublished 6 Sep 2026Paid member since 2 Sep 2026

Affiliate disclosure: we paid $269 for our own seat in Charles Floate's community and earn a commission if you join through our links. That does not change the price you pay.

Charles Floate is a British SEO consultant who started ranking sites at 12, took two Google penalties for teaching black hat in public, sold 25+ courses under Charles Floate Training, and now runs AI SEO Rainmakers, a $269 a month Skool community that sold its first 100 seats in 7 hours. This profile covers the record, the rates, and what his Skool actually is.

Charles Floate at a glance

Who is Charles Floate?

Charles Floate is an SEO consultant, educator and founder from the UK who has worked in search since he was 12 years old. His own bio on charles.info puts the span at 18 years across white, grey and black hat. He now lives in Koh Samui, Thailand, where he runs AI SEO Rainmakers and a small AI tooling shop called Shadow Ship Labs.

Two things set him apart from most SEO educators. He tests on live sites and publishes the results, including the failures. And he teaches techniques Google forbids, in the open, with the risk stated on each one. That combination earned him the nickname "The God of SEO" and, twice, a personal penalty from Google.

Charles Floate's timeline

The dates below come from charles.info and the seo.stream profile page, both read on 6 September 2026. Where the two sources disagree on a year, we give the age instead.

Along the way he sold his stake in Topical Map AI, built ParasiteSEO.com, and worked as fractional CMO for several AI companies. Those roles matter for one reason: the material inside Rainmakers is written by someone who has run marketing budgets, not only sold courses about them.

See Charles Floate's Skool →$269/mo · next step $279 · 7-day refund

The shift to AI SEO and the launch of Rainmakers

For most of his career Charles sold links, PBNs and parasite pages. In 2025 and 2026 the pitch changed. The numbers he cites on seo.stream are the reason: 68% of searches end without a click (SparkToro and Similarweb, June 2026), CTR at position one drops 34.5% under an AI Overview (Ahrefs), and paid CTR rises 91% when an AI engine cites the brand (Seer, November 2025). His argument is that ranking a blue link no longer pays the way it did, so the job is now getting cited by AI engines and building the tooling to do it at scale.

AI SEO Rainmakers is the product of that shift. It opened on Skool on 10 August 2026. The founding 100 seats at $179 sold out in 7 hours. seo.stream says the community passed 250 members within 7 days and broke into Skool's top 100 within 10 days. The live Skool about page showed 298 members on 2 September and 314 on 6 September 2026, so the growth claim checks out. We paid $269 on 2 September and have been inside since.

The price rises $10 every 25 members and never comes back down. Our pricing page tracks every step of the ladder.

Consulting rates, audience and press

Charles still sells his time. As of 6 September 2026 his published rates are $799 for a 15-minute call, $2,499 for a 1-hour strategy session, and $9,999 for a Recovery Analysis. The Skool sales copy uses the hourly rate as the anchor for the "$1,000+ per hour AI SEO framework" bonus. Members get the same brain on the Wednesday call at $269 a month, which is the value argument the whole community rests on.

On X he posts as @Charles_SEO: 97.2K followers, 36K posts, an account opened in February 2013. The pinned thread, "The $250,000 Mistake", had 4.7 million views when we read it on 6 September 2026. The account is where he announces drops before they reach the community, such as the 100+ AI SEO skill files he released on 5 September 2026.

The seo.stream profile lists press mentions in Business Insider, The Independent, The Times, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, Ahrefs, Semrush and Niche Pursuits. We did not verify each of those articles. Treat that list as his claim until you find the pieces yourself.

How Charles Floate teaches

Three habits define his teaching, and they show up in every call recording we watched.

He tests on live sites. On 5 September 2026 he posted that a page written entirely by an AI model, with no humaniser, had been live for 10 days and was already cited in an AI Overview and ranking first organically. That is a typical post: a claim, a live URL, a date.

He teaches black hat and grey hat openly. He calls the stance "Money Hat". White, grey and black are risk settings, and you pick one on data and the client's risk appetite. His own phrase is "SERP consensus over Google's guidelines": copy what ranks, not what the documentation says. Inside Rainmakers that means parasite SEO, a Dark Library, and a course module literally titled "Bypass Fable Safeguards". If your employer or client needs a clean compliance story, read our review before you pay.

He stays until the questions run out. The seo.stream home page promises a 90-minute call. The community page says 3.5 hours. The three recordings we watched ran 3 hours 57 minutes in total, and the format is Q&A, not lecture.

What Charles Floate's Skool community is, and who it suits

People searching "Charles Floate Skool" usually want to know whether the community is the same product as the old courses. It is not. AI SEO Rainmakers is a monthly subscription on Skool with five parts: a weekly live call, a 10-course classroom of 70 modules gated by Skool engagement level, CharlesGPT 3.1, four downloadable repos plus a Claude skills library, and a feed that passed 540 posts in its first three weeks. Our curriculum page lists every course with its measured video length: 6 hours 37 minutes across 27 lessons, with about 60% of that being call recordings.

It suits working SEOs and affiliates who already run sites and want operator-level material with a direct line to Charles each week. It does not suit beginners (our sister review scored beginner friendliness 2.8 out of 5), nor teams that cannot touch grey or black hat. The Skool community page goes through the level-gating, the refund condition ("DM me BEFORE level 3"), and what unlocks when.

If the price is the sticking point, our alternatives page and the best AI SEO Skool communities list cover the cheaper options, with the caveat that none of them come with Charles.

Charles Floate courses: old vs new

Charles Floate Training was a catalogue of one-off products. You paid once for a course on PBNs, parasite SEO, AI content or link selling, downloaded it, and that was the relationship. Over the years it grew to 25+ courses, eBooks and webinars, reached the top 100 sellers on Gumroad, and by his count trained more than 20,000 SEOs. Masterminds in London, Chiang Mai and Brighton ran alongside.

AI SEO Rainmakers replaced that model in August 2026. Everything new he makes goes into the Skool community first: the CharlesGPT CLI promised for October 2026, the Community Toolkit that his repos are moving into, the monthly Operator roadmap through December 2026, and the skill file drops. The testimonials on seo.stream, including Julian Goldie and Mark Hald of MrQ, come from the old courses (the footer says so). The new community is three and a half weeks old and has no long-term track record yet, which is the honest trade-off for getting in early at a lower locked rate.

One naming note. Google confuses Charles Floate with Julian Goldie because Goldie's testimonial sits on the sales page. They run separate communities. Charles's Skool handle is charles-floate-8318, and some members type the community name as AI SEO Rainmaker in the singular. Same offer either way.