98.0% of Top-1M Sites on Course-Selling Platforms Show No Course Markup on Their Crawled Pages

Summary

Picture a yoga teacher who sells a 6-week online course on her own site. When someone asks an AI assistant for "the best beginner yoga course online," the assistant builds its list from pages it can read clearly. Course markup states the course name, who offers it, what it costs, how long it takes and when it runs.

Google uses Course markup for course lists and course info results, and AI engines can use the same fields to compare options. For independent course creators competing with large marketplaces, it is one of the few structured signals they control.

On the top-1M sites running course-selling platforms, 98.0% showed no Course markup on the pages HTTP Archive crawled in October 2026.

What we measured

We used four October crawls from HTTP Archive (2023 to 2026), mobile client, top-1M sites. We kept sites where HTTP Archive detects a course-selling platform or course plugin, such as Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi, LearnWorlds, Podia, LearnDash, LearnPress or Skilljar, and checked their homepage and one sampled inner page for Course nodes in the rendered JSON-LD, after flattening nested objects and @graph arrays.

Institutional learning systems used by schools and employers, such as Moodle and Canvas, are excluded from the creator group because their pages are mostly logins. Property counts cover every 2026 page with Course markup, on any site, and are reported in aggregate.

Course platforms rarely show Course markup

The share with markup has grown, from a very low base.

Course-platform sites account for 18 of the 861 top-1M sites with Course markup in 2026.

Who uses Course markup on course platforms

Adoption by platform as detected by HTTP Archive, in 2026. Numbers are small, so read them as who uses it, not as a ranking.

Course pages often sit on subdomains or checkout pages that a one-inner-page crawl does not reach, which lowers every figure here.

Existing Course markup leaves out price and schedule

Across all sites with Course markup, identity fields are near complete. Fields that answer "how much" and "when" are missing on most pages.

An AI assistant asked for an affordable, short or beginner-friendly course has little to go on when these fields are blank.

What this means

If you sell courses, check one course sales page in a schema validator. It should have a Course node with name, description and provider, plus offers with price and currency, and hasCourseInstance with courseMode (online or in person) and a courseSchedule or courseWorkload. Add timeRequired, teaches and an instructor where you can. If your platform does not output it, you may need custom code or a plugin. An AEO agency can write that code once and apply it across every course page.

AI assistants compare courses on price, length and level. Give them those facts directly. Find out whether assistants recommend your course today with a free AI visibility audit, then decide if the markup work needs answer engine optimization services or just a plugin.

Limits

HTTP Archive crawls one homepage and one inner page per site, so many course pages are not sampled and adoption is understated.

Platform detection depends on HTTP Archive's fingerprints and can miss platforms on custom domains.

Platform group sizes are small; a few sites change the shares a lot.

We count JSON-LD only.

Frequently asked questions

Related studies

• Niche schema types AI answers can read1 in 68 JSON-LD Blocks on Top Sites Fails to Parse
• Niche schema types AI answers can read87.6% of Forum Pages Lack Discussion Markup
• Niche schema types AI answers can read86% of Sites With Event Tools Show No Event Markup
• Niche schema types AI answers can read98.8% of Sites Using Hiring Software Lack Job Markup