I started Siddhi Yoga in 2013 after years of practicing and teaching in India, when I kept meeting students abroad who wanted real training but had no way to access it without relocating. Most online yoga certifications at the time were either too generic or stripped the tradition down to a fitness routine. What sets us apart is that our courses are taught by Indian yoga masters who grew up inside this practice, not instructors who picked up a script. Students get the philosophy and the Ayurvedic context alongside the physical postures, which is why teachers who train with us tend to carry that depth into their own classes years later.

Referrals from past graduates make up the bulk of our enrollments right now, since a large share of our 5,000 plus alumni end up recommending us to their own students once they start teaching. I would like to see more growth come from people finding us through our blog content and search, because that audience tends to arrive already curious about the deeper side of yoga rather than just hunting for a certificate. Right now our writing brings in traffic but converts at a lower rate than word of mouth, and closing that gap is something I think about often.

We use AI to draft the first pass of course scheduling emails and reminders, since that used to eat hours of admin time every week and the content is straightforward enough that a template works fine. Where it failed was grading practical assignments for our teacher training students, things like sequencing logic or how someone cues breath during a pose. I tried using it to speed up feedback on video submissions and the notes came back generic, missing the small corrections that actually matter to someone learning to teach, so we moved that back to our senior trainers reviewing every submission personally.

Yes, and it’s been noticeable over the past several months. People now message us having already compared certification hours, pricing, and accreditation across several schools before we ever speak with them, which used to take a full sales conversation to walk through. We have also started seeing a small but real number of inquiries where someone mentions they asked ChatGPT or a similar tool to recommend a yoga teacher training program and our name came up, which tells me these assistants are already pulling from what’s written about us online.

I would tell them to put real effort into writing detailed, accurate content about their own programs, because AI assistants are already pulling recommendations from what exists online about a business, and thin or vague pages simply won’t get surfaced. Get specific about curriculum hours, instructor backgrounds, and what actually happens in a course rather than repeating generic wellness language, since that specificity is what both search engines and AI tools latch onto.

What I would tell them to ignore is the pressure to automate the parts of the business that depend on human judgment just because the technology is available. In our world that means teacher assessments, one on one student feedback, and anything tied to a person’s actual practice. Chasing efficiency there costs you the trust that got your students to sign up in the first place.