$ man geo/from-zero-to-cited

PATTERN

The first three weeks focus on technical infrastructure and baseline measurement. Week 1: audit your existing content for extractability - check heading structure, answer block formatting, and paragraph length. Implement Article schema on your top 10 pages. Set up or verify your robots.txt allows AI crawlers. Create or update your sitemap with accurate lastmod dates. Week 2: create your llms.txt file. Set up or optimize your RSS feed with full content bodies. Run your first manual citation audit - test 20 queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Document your baseline. Week 3: identify your topic cluster and run a subtopic gap analysis. List every subtopic you should cover and check which ones you already have content for. Prioritize gaps by search volume and competitive weakness. By the end of week three, your technical foundation is in place and you know exactly where you stand.

PATTERN

Weeks four through eight are your content production phase. Week 4: write three to five new pages filling your highest-priority subtopic gaps. Use the answer block pattern for every section. Include three or more citable claims per page - specific statistics, named frameworks, or concrete benchmarks. Week 5: update your five best-performing existing pages - refresh examples, add new data points, update dateModified across schema, RSS, and sitemap. Republish through RSS. Week 6: write three more subtopic pages and create your first piece of citation bait - a data report, benchmark study, or survey-based insight that produces claims AI engines need to attribute. Week 7: build cross-references between all your new and existing content. Add related links. Check for orphan pages. Ensure every page has at least two internal links pointing to it. Week 8: run your second citation audit. Compare against your week three baseline. You should start seeing some citations appearing, especially on Perplexity which indexes new content fastest.

PATTERN

The final phase amplifies what is working and fixes what is not. Week 9: analyze your week eight audit results. Which pages got cited? What format were the citations in? What content did the AI extract? Double down on the patterns that worked. Week 10: create a second piece of citation bait - another data point, study, or framework. Publish it with all GEO signals aligned. Share it on LinkedIn and X to build social signals and entity reinforcement. Week 11: update all content again - refresh dates, add any new data, fix any broken links. Do a technical audit - verify all schema is valid, RSS feed is complete, sitemap is accurate, llms.txt reflects current content. Week 12: run your third citation audit. Calculate your 90-day progress - citation rate change, pages cited, AI referral traffic, and competitive positioning. Document what worked and what you will iterate on in the next quarter.

PRO TIP

Realistic expectations for 90 days. If you are starting from a site with some existing authority and content, you should see initial AI citations appearing by week six to eight, with measurable improvements in your citation rate by week twelve. If you are starting from a brand new domain with no existing content, the timeline extends - expect first citations around week ten to twelve. What you should not expect: overnight results. AI engines take time to crawl, index, evaluate, and start citing new sources. They also need to build entity associations, which requires repeated exposure to your brand across multiple content pieces. Do not change your strategy every two weeks because you are not seeing results yet. The 90-day playbook works because it gives the system enough time to build momentum. The compound effect of technical signals plus content depth plus entity reinforcement takes time to kick in, but once it does, citations tend to accelerate because each citation reinforces the signals that drive more citations.

FORMULA

GEO is not a one-time project - it is an ongoing system. After the initial 90 days, establish a monthly cadence. Week one of each month: run your citation audit. Track your metrics. Identify what changed. Week two: update your top-performing pages and publish one new piece of content or citation bait. Week three: address any technical issues from your audit - broken schema, stale sitemap entries, RSS gaps. Week four: analyze competitor citations and identify any new opportunity gaps. This monthly cadence takes four to six hours total and maintains the momentum you built in the first 90 days. The goal is consistent improvement, not heroic sprints. Teams that maintain a steady GEO cadence outperform teams that do an intensive project, stop for three months, then scramble to catch up. Treat GEO like you treat SEO - an always-on practice with regular measurement and iteration, not a campaign with a start and end date.