How matching works
AI Course Signal is a transparent rule-based engine. It is not AI-powered, not a black box, and not optimized for commission. Every point a course earns is traceable to one answer you gave, and the full weight table is published below — the same constants that ship in the site's code.
The five signals
The quiz asks five questions: your goal, experience, weekly time, budget, and preferred format. Each course in the catalog is tagged against the same dimensions, plus the language it is taught in. Scoring is additive: when a course's tags match your answer, it earns points.
The weights
| Rule | Points | Why it weighs that much |
|---|---|---|
| Goal match | +6 | The strongest signal — a course that doesn't serve your goal is never a good match. |
| Experience match | +4 | A course pitched at the wrong level wastes your time, free or not. |
| Budget fit | +3 | The price tier falls within your stated budget. |
| Format match | +3 | Self-paced, live cohort, or community — matching how you actually learn. |
| Time fit | +2 | The course realistically fits your weekly hours. |
| Free entry path | +1 | A paid product that still offers a genuine free way in (e.g. free to audit). |
| "Any format" | +1 | A small neutral credit when you have no format preference. |
| Language mismatch | -8 | Applied when a course is not taught in the language you took the quiz in. A Chinese speaker should not be routed to English-only courses, or vice versa. |
| Budget mismatch | -12 | Strongly negative. Recommending a course you can't afford is a bad match, whatever it would earn us. |
What the results show you
The top three matches are shown with the exact reasons they scored — which of your answers drove each match — plus an honest "watch out for" caveat for every course, including the ones we have an affiliate relationship with. Your result is encoded in the page URL, so you can bookmark or share it.
Reason keys, not hard-coded copy
The engine never returns user-facing strings. Each scoring reason is a key (e.g. reason.goal) plus parameters (e.g. which goal you picked); the UI renders that key through the active locale dictionary, in English or Chinese. One scoring codebase serves both languages, and copy can never influence ranking.
Where the course facts come from
The catalog mirrors our sister site, aicourserank.com, where each course gets a structured review based on public syllabi, pricing pages, formats, and published student feedback — never invented first-hand experience. Read the review methodology on aicourserank.com for how courses are evaluated.