Basics

A 90-day GEO playbook, week by week

A practical 13-week GEO plan for small teams: set up measurement, fix technical basics, publish answer-first pages, do honest outreach, and test what worked.

Updated 9 min readPublished by AI Knows Us (Clyra Labs), which sells GEO software

Short answer

A 90-day GEO plan has four phases. Weeks 1 and 2: write your fact sheet, build a blind question set and take a baseline. Weeks 3 and 4: fix technical access and your core pages. Weeks 5 to 10: publish answer-first pages for your top gaps and do honest outreach to the lists, directories and review sites AI apps cite. Weeks 11 to 13: re-measure, compare treated questions against a control group, and plan the next quarter from what the numbers show.

On this page
  1. Before you start
  2. Weeks 1 and 2: baseline
  3. Weeks 3 and 4: foundations
  4. Weeks 5 to 10: build
  5. Weeks 11 to 13: test and plan
  6. Setting expectations
  7. How we help
  8. Frequently asked questions
  9. Sources

Before you start

This plan assumes a small team: one person owning GEO for a few hours a week, plus help from whoever writes content and manages the site. Stretch it if you have less time. Do not skip the measurement weeks.

PhaseWeeksGoal
Baseline1 to 2Know where you stand, honestly
Foundations3 to 4Remove blockers and fix core pages
Build5 to 10Close the biggest gaps on and off your site
Test and plan11 to 13Find out what worked and decide what is next

Weeks 1 and 2: baseline

  1. Week 1. Write your entity sentence: who you are, what you sell, who it is for.
  2. Week 1. Build a fact sheet: products, prices with GST treatment and date, locations, founding year, key features. Confirm every line.
  3. Week 1. Collect 30 to 60 buyer questions from sales and support. Remove your brand name from all of them.
  4. Week 2. Tag each question by cluster and tier. Pick your Tier 1 set.
  5. Week 2. Choose a control group: similar questions you will not work on this quarter.
  6. Week 2. Run a baseline: each question, on each AI app, several times, with search on. Record mentions, citations, position, competitors and sources.

Weeks 3 and 4: foundations

  1. Week 3. Check robots.txt, CDN and firewall for blocked search agents. Fix them.
  2. Week 3. Confirm key pages render their text in plain HTML.
  3. Week 3. Update your sitemap and submit it.
  4. Week 3. Add Organization JSON-LD with your entity sentence.
  5. Week 4. Rewrite your About page around the entity sentence and fact sheet.
  6. Week 4. Rewrite your pricing page: rupees, GST treatment, billing period, date.
  7. Week 4. Claim and correct your main directory profiles so they match the fact sheet.

Weeks 5 to 10: build

Use the baseline to pick your targets. For each Tier 1 question where you are missing, decide the cause:

CauseFixWhere it goes in the plan
No page answers the questionPublish a citation-first pageContent track
A page exists but buries the answerRewrite with an answer box and clear factsContent track
AI apps cite lists you are not onHonest outreach to authorsOutreach track
AI apps cite directories or reviewsComplete profiles, ask real customers for reviewsOutreach track
AI apps describe you wronglyFix facts on your site and ask others to correct theirsBoth tracks

A realistic weekly rhythm for a small team:

  • Content track: one or two new or rewritten pages a week, each passing the ten-point checklist.
  • Outreach track: a handful of well-researched pitches or profile updates a week.
  • Review requests: a steady flow to real customers, with no incentives.
  • Internal links: link each new page from two or three related pages.

Weeks 11 to 13: test and plan

  1. Week 11. Re-run every question on every AI app with the same settings as the baseline.
  2. Week 11. For each AI app, compute the mention rate with a 95% range for treated and control questions.
  3. Week 12. Use a two-proportion test to compare baseline and now. Call a change real only if it clears the 95% level.
  4. Week 12. Compare treated with control. If both moved together, look for an outside cause.
  5. Week 12. Read the new source lists. Did the pages you pitched start naming you? Did your own pages start being cited?
  6. Week 13. Write a one-page review: what moved, what did not, what you learned.
  7. Week 13. Plan the next quarter: keep what worked, drop what did not, pick new Tier 1 gaps.

Setting expectations

Some changes show up only after pages are crawled and indexed, and answers that come from model memory change only when models are updated. A quarter may show clear movement on some AI apps and none on others. That is normal. Report honestly, with ranges, and keep going.

  • Do report: rates with ranges, treated vs control, source changes.
  • Do not report: one screenshot, a single lucky answer, or a change that did not beat the noise.

How we help

We follow this same loop in AI Knows Us: baseline, gap diagnosis, drafted pages and outreach, and tiered re-measurement with control groups, so a small team can run the plan in a few hours a week.

Frequently asked questions

Can I do this in less than 90 days?

You can do the work faster, but you still need time for pages to be crawled and for enough checks to build a reliable rate. Short tests often end in noise.

How many questions should I track?

Enough to cover your main buyer jobs. Keep the Tier 1 set small enough to check often, and the rest on a slower schedule.

What if nothing changes by week 13?

Check the basics first: were pages crawled, did AI apps search, were the control and treated groups similar? Then look at whether the gaps were on third-party pages you have not reached yet.

Should I work on every AI app at once?

Measure all of them, but prioritise fixes that help several AI apps, such as crawlability, clear pages and third-party presence.

Who should own GEO in a small company?

Usually the person who owns content or marketing, with help from whoever manages the website.

Sources

Last verified: 17 September 2026. Facts on this page come from the public documents below. Brands such as Tallybook are fictional and used only as examples.

  1. Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024)
  2. Google Search Central: AI features and your website
  3. Wikipedia: Binomial proportion confidence interval (Wilson score interval)
  4. Wikipedia: Two-proportion Z-test
  5. OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers
  6. Our methodology

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