Jacky Chou Review: Does Partnership SEO Still Work in 2025?

Jacky Chou: Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Jacky Chou has a legitimate track record of success with documented $150K+/month revenue across multiple online businesses
• His transparent “building in public” approach on his Jacky Chou from Indexsy YouTube channel provides accountability and real-time business insights for free
• Track record of solid community engagement with Advise.so having 500+ active high-level members and Local Rank Academy having 140+ members
• Featured in major publications including Forbes, Entrepreneur, Oberlo, and GoDaddy

Cons:

• Jacky Chou promotes the use of gray hat and black hat SEO tactics that have gotten many of his websites “clapped” by Google
• Limited publicly available data about student success rates with Advise.so and Local Rank Academy
• Experienced the most success doing affiliate marketing with partnership SEO, but presents himself as a local SEO coach to sell his courses and SaaS products

Does Jacky Chou’s Partnership SEO strategy still work in 2025?

Yes, Jacky Chou’s partnership SEO strategy still works in 2025. However, it’s much less effective now than in 2024 because Google changed its algorithm and SERP content.

Jacky Chou claims to have generated over $2 million from SEO partnerships, earning $400-$500K/month in Q1 of 2024. Partnership SEO is a parasite SEO strategy where you partner with legacy media brands to leverage their website authority to rank more easily on Google. Jacky’s strategy has been to use AI to scale content production and rank affiliate articles. He then splits the earnings from the affiliate links with the legacy media outlets 50/50.

Jacky Chou mentions that he lost nearly all revenue from his partnership websites around the end of 2024. That’s because Google significantly lessened the visibility of legacy media brands and gave Jacky penalties for using AI content. Google’s AI overviews are also showing up for more search queries now, taking traffic from many queries that affiliate articles target. However, Jacky mentions that some of his partnership affiliate articles started gaining traction again in April 2025, indicating the strategy can still work to some extent.

Who Is Jacky Chou?

Jacky Chou is a Canadian entrepreneur with Taiwanese roots who transformed from earning just $450/month in 2014 to building a $293,000/month online business empire by 2024. Although he earned an electrical engineering degree from the University of British Columbia, he developed a preference for digital marketing after an internship in Berlin at Trademob in 2014, which is also when he started Indexsy. His digital marketing career progressed rapidly in Berlin, going from Jr. Campaign Manager in 2015 to Director of Growth at a startup by 2017.

Chou had his big breakthrough in 2018 when he started a dropshipping store with a co-founder and went full-time on Indexsy, earning $55K/month. Although his dropshipping store success faded in 2019 when Facebook rules started targeting dropshipping stores, Indexsy continued to perform well at $45k/month. He continued with Ecommerce, launching his Dinnerware brand Far & Away in 2020.

In 2021, he reached a new level while stuck at home during Covid, working 16-hour days. He averaged $208k/month by day trading stocks and crypto, flipping websites, and managing his Indexsy clients. In 2023, he started pitching partnership sites to generate traffic for his affiliate links instead of building new niche websites. By 2024, this parasite SEO tactic had allowed him to scale his online business to $293k/month. In 2025, he’s promoting his SaaS products for local SEO and his local SEO courses and communities.

What is Jacky Chou’s Local Rank Academy Skool community?

Jacky Chou’s Local Rank Academy Skool community is a local SEO program for beginners looking to land their first local SEO client. The community has over 130 members and operates on a $69/month subscription model.

The program consists of:

• 15 training videos and guides focused specifically on Google Maps ranking strategies
• Ready-to-use business assets like retainer contracts, recommended books, and free backlink lists
• Daily Q&A sessions where Jacky and his coaches provide answers or custom Loom video responses
• Weekly live hotseats where members receive video coaching in front of the entire group
• Revenue-share opportunities allowing members to earn money by helping other members succeed
• Integration with LocalRank.so software for practical implementation of learned strategies

The community targets the “straightest-line path to growing your local SEO agency to $10k/mo” and emphasizes practical implementation over theoretical knowledge. Members gain access to Jacky’s systematic approach to local SEO client acquisition, focusing on Google Maps optimization as the primary strategy for generating leads and securing retainer clients.

The program offers a 90-day money-back guarantee with the promise that members will land their first paying client within 90 days, provided they meet specific participation requirements, including:

• Attending every coaching call
• Updating the group daily
• Showing up to work consistently

What is Jacky Chou’s Advise.so private community?

Jacky Chou’s Advise.so private community is a premium community for experienced SEO professionals and entrepreneurs. It features over 500 vetted members and costs $169/month as of 2025. The community promotes itself as “The Most Active SEO Community on the Internet” and maintains strict membership requirements to ensure high-quality discussions among established practitioners.

Advise.so membership requirements are:

• Members must be willing to share growth tactics openly with the community
• Applicants cannot be complete beginners or basic service providers
• Professional moderation by Jacky Chou and Sean ensures no self-promotion and facilitates quality discussions

Advise.so exclusive member benefits include:

• Twice-monthly AMA hangouts hosted by Jacky and Sean for live Q&A sessions
• Website “roast” sessions during AMAs where the community provides detailed feedback on member sites
• Access to negotiated deals on SEO tools and software, potentially saving more than the membership cost
• Jacky’s complete Local SEO Course included with membership
• Sean’s Domains + SEO Course as an additional training resource
• Ability to post on the Advise Marketplace for business opportunities

The community highlights success stories on its website, with one member testimonial claiming the community helped them scale to over $30,000/month in revenue.

One Reddit user describes Advise.so as “worth every penny”.

When should you choose rank and rent over scaling a local SEO agency?

You should choose rank and rent over scaling a local SEO agency when your goal is to make long-term, passive income. A local SEO agency requires active management of clients, meeting with them monthly to review results and justify your monthly retainer price. You need to show them explicitly how your agency’s work leads to concrete outcomes for their business’s revenue. After you do the hard work of ranking a business high on the first page of Google, they can fire you with minimal consequences. There’s a good chance they will continue ranking on Google for a while without ongoing SEO support because of the groundwork you’ve already laid.

That’s why I coach rank and rent rather than local SEO services. With rank and rent websites, the leads you send clients each month are your proof of performance. Furthermore, you own the asset instead of your client owning the asset. That means your client can’t easily fire you because then they will lose a valuable source of leads, which negatively impacts their business’s revenue.

In our local lead generation course, we teach you how to rank these digital assets long-term. You can enjoy periods of passive income while your client automatically receives the marketing benefits from your website. If the fear of cold calling and pitching clients is holding you back, I’m even offering my students the ability to generate leads for my own roofing client . Roofing jobs can range anywhere from 5K-$1M+ and my client is paying up to a 5% commission rate.