This is a bit of a scatterbrained post I think but there are some valid points in there (sometimes repeatedly)

> Second, he seems to be a co-founder of Precision Nutrition, which suffers from a lot of the same problems as Examine.com. Seriously, let's look at the first entries in their "Free Articles" section:

Firstly, you don't do a lot of nutritional research, do you? Or research on fitness and health? There was a reason why I wrote what I did. This company is one of the major players in that sector. Hence why if you can't verify that he endorses this website you should be looking for an easier to digest source that comes from one of your favourite publishing houses.

When you do research on a website do you just look at that website? If so, I have bad news for you. You are doing a terrible job of researching. And most likely will result in getting yourself scammed by thinking you can spot a scam website when you can't.

Step 1. Google the site. - It's quite a comprehensive result page including multiple related searches.
Step 2. Look at what other orgnisations trust this one. If you look at the courses they sell, you'll see they're accepted by multiple groups. (Again, if you want to be save you do separate research on them)
Step 3. Look at their social media. Their social media seems to be rather good. Not every post is selling something. First 4 I seen, not a single "buy this" or anythig. Just standard fitness stuff I would expect.

> Click-bait and attempts to sell things.

Business tries to sell things. The fact you've stated this multiple times tells me you are far too into the tech culture of VCs paying for your toys. In the business world without VCs paying for growth these companies need to sell you stuff. The sales tactics are well sales tactics. But just because someone is trying to sell you something doesn't mean they don't know what they're talking about. Since every expert in any field is selling you stuff.

Now let's look at these clickbait things. Ok two of them aren't clickbait at all. They are very clear on what is going on. It's alerting you that the new round of courses that they do and have been doing for years are starting. In my experience, any company selling you a course that you can just sign up and start straight away is selling you a course not worth a penny. (Disclaimer I've done their PN1 course and let me say it's worth every penny). So firstly, we've got something to give me confidence about the course. It has a start date. This also tells me who they're targetting. They are targetting professional coaches. So that means stuff like how do you rank as a coach is something they're going to want to read and get an idea to see how they are.

Realistically, I find these hard to classify as clickbait since when you click on it. You get what you expect. Are they written with the intention to help sell you stuff? Yes. Just like nearly everything else you read on a company website. I just think you're just far too used to the tech approach that you think it should apply to everything else even though the customers are different.

> And then there's the second part of the question - how do I know John Berardi actually recommends this site? I don't without taking the site at their word.

You use Google. I instantly found the below post. So these two are friends who visit each others houses it seems. Friends giving friends quotes, pretty much how all quotes on these websites are created in my experience.

https://www.facebook.com/john.berardi.page/posts/22337770833...

If you listen to the guys podcasts, etc. You'll all certainly hear him talking about them. If you're on his newsletter you'll read about them at some point.

Anytime you want to know if a quote is real, you're going to need to do research. But if you were into this subject you would probably hear 4-5 respected people telling you about how awesome examine is. Which comes back to my original point of if you can't verify that quote, it's not for you. The guy's reputation in the field is so high and he's repeatedly publically suggested their services.