Your First 30 Days of AEO: What to Do, In Order
Most AEO advice is a list of everything you could do, which is useless when you are deciding what to do on Monday. This is a sequence — what to do first, what to leave until week four, and what to ignore entirely at the start. It assumes one person, a few hours a week, and no budget beyond their time.
Week 1: find out where you stand
Do not fix anything yet. You cannot tell whether something worked without a starting point, and skipping this step is the single most common reason businesses can't tell six months later whether any of it did anything.
Write twenty questions your buyers would actually ask — five each of brand, category, problem, and comparison. Write them as full sentences, the way someone talks to an assistant, not as keywords.
A few examples to calibrate against:
- a brand question might be "is [company] worth it for a small team,"
- a category question "what are the best tools for tracking AI visibility,"
- a problem question "how do I find out if ChatGPT recommends my business,"
- and a comparison question "[company] vs [competitor], which is better for agencies."
Ask all twenty on four platforms. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity. Fresh conversation each time, personalization off — this matters more than it sounds, because a personalized session can quietly reflect your own browsing history back at you instead of what a stranger would actually see. Record whether you were named, where in the answer, which other brands appeared, and which sources were cited.
A simple log works better than memory: one row per question, columns for platform, mentioned (yes/no), position in the answer, and which sources were cited. Eighty rows by the end of week one, and every one of them becomes useful again at day 90.
That is your baseline. Keep the questions — you will use them again in ninety days, unchanged. Expect the result to be worse than you hoped. Almost everyone is absent from the category and problem questions on the first run, and that's the actual starting point, not a sign something is broken.
| Week | Goal | Key Actions | Est. Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Establish a baseline | 20 questions across brand/category/problem/comparison, asked on 4 platforms, logged | 3-4 hours |
| Week 2 | Remove blockers | Check raw-source readability, audit robots.txt, unify company description everywhere | 2-4 hours |
| Week 3 | Make yourself quotable | Rewrite 5 key pages answer-first, add Organization + FAQPage schema, question-style headings | 4-6 hours |
| Week 4 | Start off-site work | Rank cited domains, claim/complete profiles, pitch one editorial roundup | 3-5 hours, ongoing |
👀 swipe to see all columns.
Making sense of your baseline
Raw yes/no answers across eighty rows are hard to act on directly, which is why it helps to translate them into three separate questions before deciding what to fix. Are you reachable and structurally sound at all — a Readiness problem if not. Are you actually named when the topic comes up — a Citation Rate problem if reachable but silent. Are you named as often as the brands beating you to the same questions — a Share of Voice problem if you're cited but consistently outnumbered.
These three questions matter because they point at different fixes. A Readiness gap means week two (crawlability, robots.txt, consistent messaging) is the priority. A Citation Rate gap with a healthy Readiness Score means week three (answer-first rewrites, schema, extractable claims) matters more. A Share of Voice gap — cited, just less often than competitors — usually means week four's off-site work is where the real gains are waiting, since it's rarely a content problem at that point.
Most businesses running this for the first time have some mix of all three, which is exactly why the weeks are sequenced rather than run in parallel — fixing week four's off-site gaps before week two's crawlability issue is fixed just means the new mentions can't be verified anyway.
Week 2: remove the blockers
Now fix the things that prevent anything else from working. Nothing in week three or four matters if a crawler can't reach the page in the first place.
Check you can be read. Open the raw source of your three most important pages and search for a sentence visible on screen. If it is missing, your content is invisible to crawlers that do not run JavaScript. This is the highest-priority finding on the entire list, and it's also the one businesses are most likely to have never checked at all.
Read your robots.txt. Plenty of sites block AI crawlers by accident, inherited from a template or a plugin default set years before anyone was thinking about AI visibility. If you find entries you did not put there, you have been running a rigged test the entire time.
Fix your descriptions. Collect every place your company is described — homepage, About, pricing, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, review profiles — and paste them into one document. Pick one sentence. Replace all the others with it, word for word. That last one takes an afternoon, costs nothing, and is the most commonly skipped item in AEO, because it feels too simple to be the fix.
Week 3: make yourself quotable
Rewrite five pages answer-first. Your five most commercially important. Put the answer in the first sentence of each section, replace pronouns in opening sentences with the actual noun, and replace unfalsifiable adjectives with numbers. Concretely: "We're the leading solution for teams" is not extractable — a model has nothing specific to lift. "LazyCats AI tracks AI visibility across four platforms and reports a Readiness Score, Citation Rate, and Share of Voice" is extractable — it names a framework and states what it measures.
Add Organization and FAQPage schema. Thirty minutes for the first, an afternoon for the second, and no new writing required for either — this is pure structural work on content you already have.
Turn your headings into questions. Not "Pricing" but "How much does it cost?" Answer immediately underneath, in the first sentence, before any qualifiers or context.
Optional: repurpose those five pages into audio. Once a page is rewritten answer-first, turning it into a short narrated clip takes minutes, not hours, using an AI text-to-speech tool like ElevenLabs — it gives the same content a second surface (voice search, podcasts, video) without new writing. (Affiliate link — LazyCats AI may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.) Not essential for month one, but a cheap add-on once the page itself is done — see our guide to voice search and AI audio content for the full playbook.
Week 4: start the slow work
Everything so far was on your own site and could be finished. This part cannot, which is why it goes last and never really ends.
Go back to your week-one notes and list every domain that appeared in the cited sources. Rank by how often each appeared — this list is more valuable than any generic "where to submit your business" checklist, because it's built from what actually gets cited in your specific space.
Claim and complete every self-serve profile on that list. Review platforms, directories, industry listings. Complete every field, not just the required ones. Ask ten happy customers for reviews on the two that appeared most often, specifically requesting they mention what they used your product for, not just that they liked it.
Pitch one editorial roundup. One, specific, with a real reason your product fits that particular article. Not fifty generic pitches sent to fifty publications — one well-targeted pitch converts more reliably than a mass campaign, and it's a more realistic amount of effort for a solo month-one push anyway.
Common mistakes in month one
Fixing things before measuring them. Skipping week one to jump straight into rewriting pages feels productive, but it means you'll have no way to tell whether anything you did actually changed the outcome.
Treating all four platforms as one. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity source and weigh content differently — a fix that moves one can do nothing for another, and testing only one platform hides that entirely.
Trying to do all four weeks in one weekend. The sequence exists partly because later steps depend on earlier ones — chasing citations in week one, before crawlability and consistent messaging are fixed, wastes the effort.
Expecting week-four results by week four. The on-site work (weeks two and three) is finishable. The off-site work (week four) is ongoing, and its effects show up on a slower, external timeline you don't control.
What to ignore for now
llms.txt. An hour of work with no verified impact. Worth doing eventually; not in your first month.
Buying a tool. Do the manual run first. You will understand what the numbers mean far better, and you will know whether your questions are the right ones before automating anything.
Publishing volume. Twenty new blog posts will not move a category question. Five rewritten pages and three review profiles will do more.
Blocking crawlers. Whatever you have read about it, this is not a first-month decision — and for most businesses trying to build AI visibility, not a decision that makes sense at all.
What to expect at day 30
Very likely nothing, in the numbers. Platforms re-crawl and re-learn on their own schedule. Six to twelve weeks before changes surface is normal, and Gemini usually moves first because it inherits Google's infrastructure.
What you should have at day 30 is a site that can be read, one consistent description of your company, five pages written to be quoted, and profiles on the sources that decide your category. Then re-run the same twenty questions at day 90. Because nothing about the questions changed, whatever difference appears is signal rather than noise — which is the entire reason for doing week one first.
