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I appreciate the SEO guidance, but I think many instructors feel there is an imbalance here.

We're asked to spend additional time optimizing course pages and helping Udemy gain visibility on Google, ChatGPT, and other search platforms, while instructors still receive a relatively small share of many marketplace sales.

If instructors are expected to contribute more to external traffic growth, perhaps it's also time to discuss a fairer sharing of the value created by those efforts.

Did Google sign UB's exclusivity agreement?

Or can Google post these courses to other platforms without risking deletion?

Key question: do they have to follow the same rules we do?

I believe this comment is very wise. I feel obligated to add to it. As some here know, I love Udemy and believe it is more important than individual instructors, or investors. I have, at some cost to me, been fighting for it's unique value on these forums for several years.

Udemy is a gift to the world. It is a technical implementation of democracy. It is what the Internet was always meant to be - making information available from anyone to everyone. I remember how ten years ago the excitement among instructors, the opportunity to combine doing well with doing good, created such powerful synergistic passion that the Udemy we know blossomed into an incredibly valuable repository. It was those intangibles, instructor passion, that drove this creation.

Udemy proved that the wisdom of distributed individuals far surpassed that available in centralized universities or corporations. It proved that proposition. It turned out that among the millions of individuals sitting in their homes around the world had more talent than the centralized few at the top.

And then it paid those individuals fairly to unleash that talent. And so Udemy grew very rapidly. Passion was the engine.

If anyone from Coursera leadership is reading this, I can only recommend that they carefully ruminate on these intangibles. I don't believe Udemy is a now mature system that can be seen as a collection of financial cogs and levers. Having been here since 2017, I see the important parts of Udemy, the parts that drove the financial growth, as being exceptionally human and intangible, as fragile as a plant in a garden, and needing that level of care.

And so, at a minimum, careful thought should be given to this. Is Udemy a department store, that sells anything? Stanford will always have courses. Google will always have courses. They can always be bought from Stanford and Google. But what Udemy has is very, very, very different. And unless those intangibles are deeply, deeply understood, and preserved, and nurtured, then they will not be around forever.

And possibly the new leadership does not understand the continuity of these problems. I've lost count of the number of Udemy CEO's I've seen. I had one on one zooms with two of them. Zane understood, but he is now gone. I just urge the current leadership to do something hard, and subjective, and probably annoying, but critically important: understand the fragility of the individual instructor ecosystem, what created it, and what is needed to preserve it, and extrapolate to what will happen if it is lost, and factor that into your strategic planning.

I think it would be fair to say that the Udemy instructor community has not seen that level of understanding or planning for several years now. As I have argued elsewhere on these forums, I believe the arrows are reversed. It is precisely that declining passion that is the cause of the declining NRR and the financial challenges the organization has faced. Therein lies the problem, and therein lies the solution. As incredibly annoying and intangible and subjective as it may be.

Sometimes the most important thing you must do is the thing you least want to do.

With the greatest of constructive intent possible - Bill.

Hey Instructor Community! 👋

We’re excited to share that starting today, June 18, 2026, we're launching a 9-episode video mini-series to help you make your Course Landing Page more discoverable on external search, think Google, Bing, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.

We’ll release three new episodes every Wednesday, with all nine episodes available by July 2.

Catch the full series here.

Here’s what to expect for the first three episodes:
Ep. 1: What's SEO & Why It Matters
How a well-optimized Course Landing Page helps the right learners find you organically.

Ep. 2: Understand Your Learners and Their Search Behavior
Discover how your learners search and how to think about the intent behind the search query.

Ep. 3: Write an Instructor Bio That Builds Trust
Highlight your expertise and personality to show learners why you're the right person to teach them.

A couple of things worth noting: these are best practices, not hard rules, and this series covers external search only, not Udemy's internal search algorithm.

More episodes coming on the following Wednesdays.

We’d love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to share your comments below!