The 90-day GEO ramp plan

Month 1: Measure and diagnose

Goal: understand where you are. No fixes yet.

Week 1

• Set up prompt groups in Rankscale using the Module 2 framework (3x2x2). Competitors get automatically tracked in Rankscale.
• Decide on your peer set (3-5 comparable brands for median benchmarking).

Week 2

• Run the daily prompt tracking for 7 days to build a baseline.
• Review Module 3 metrics: Visibility Score, Position, Sentiment, Mentions, Citations, Detection Rate, Share of Voice.
• Set Floor and Standard benchmarks (global category, niche, niche-in-niche).

Week 3

• Run the Module 3 diagnosis. Identify which of the 3 gaps (SEO, Content, PR) is dominant.
• Score each prompt group across all 7 metrics.
• Build the prioritization list: 10-15 fixes ordered by impact and effort.

Week 4

• Assign owners for the top 5 fixes (RACI).
• Set up the weekly tracker (Module 7).
• Commit to the operating rhythm cadence starting Month 2 (this module, lesson 8.1).

Exit criteria for Month 1

• Prompt groups tracked in Rankscale
• Baseline data captured for 7+ days
• Floor and Standard benchmarks set
• Prioritized fix list with owners
• Weekly tracker in place

Do not start Month 2 until every box is checked. Starting fixes without a baseline means you cannot prove they worked.

Month 2: Ship first fixes

Goal: move the number on at least 3 prompt groups. Prove the system produces results.

Week 5-6: SEO Gap fixes first

SEO fixes are the fastest to ship and the easiest to verify. Start here.

• Fix crawlability issues (WAF and robots.txt allowlist for GPTBot, CCBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot).
• Implement or repair JSON-LD schema on priority or strategic pages (Article, FAQPage, HowTo, Organization, Product).
• Validate JS-rendered content is accessible without JavaScript execution.

Week 6-7: Content Gap fixes

Move in parallel with SEO fixes once crawlability is clean.

• Write BLUF blocks (40-80 words) for your top 10 most-cited URLs.
• Add justification blocks with evidence and data.
• Publish 2-3 grounding pages for priority entities.

Week 7-8: PR Gap fixes start

PR is slowest. Start during Month 2 even if results will not appear until Month 4.

• Claim or update G2, Capterra, Gartner Peer Insights listings.
• Set up HARO, Connectively, Qwoted accounts.
• Identify 5-10 target journalists or expert contributor columns to pitch.
• Fix entity gaps: Wikidata, Knowledge Panel, LinkedIn, Crunchbase. If relevant AngelList and GitHub.

Exit criteria for Month 2

• At least 3 prompt groups show measurable movement
• 10+ pages with BLUF blocks shipped
• All AI crawlers unblocked and confirmed
• 5+ Tier 1 PR outreach conversations in motion
• Entity platforms claimed and updated

Month 3: Operating rhythm live

Goal: the team can run GEO without you watching it.

Week 9

• Run the first full weekly tracker update as a team ritual.
• First bi-weekly Marketing Lead report.
• Content Writer ships 2 page updates using Page Audit + Scout + rules AI-citable content from Module 5.

Week 10

• Second weekly tracker. First signs of trend data.
• Sentiment review: any negative keywords to flag to Comms?
• Prompt Research: identify 1 new niche to expand into.

Week 11

• Third weekly. Refresh top 3 cited URLs (freshness rule).
• Continue PR outreach. First signs of citations from Month 2 pitches should appear.

Week 12

• First full monthly exec report using the Module 7 narrative framework.
• Identify which narrative archetype applies (Invisible / Growing / Defending).
• Plan for Month 4 (new prompt groups, expansion, or defense).

Exit criteria for Month 3

• Weekly tracker running for 4 consecutive weeks
• First monthly exec report delivered
• Operating rhythm documented and owned
• Visibility Score trending up or holding above Floor
• Team can explain the program to a new hire in 30 minutes

Worked example: the content workflow

Here is the full process Rankscale ran on a blog and comparison portal, that outperformed established players within weeks:

1. Set up prompts to get cited for: 4 different prompt groups (see Module 1).
2. Ran prompt variations per prompt group daily for 1 week to build a stable baseline.
3. Looked at the top-performing URLs per category. Sorted by tags (intent, segment, niche). This revealed what works well in the blog / comparison-portal content category.
4. Fed the content of the top 5 URLs into Claude per tag we wanted to perform well on.
5. Asked Claude to create content based on the AI-Citable Content Rules from Module 5: BLUF, JSON-LD schema, freshness signals, evidence and data, question-format headers, justification attributes, chunkability, robots.txt configuration, semantic HTML.
6. Improved the BLUF of top-performing pages based on the content worksheet (including sentiment data).
7. Created grounding pages for each entity described on the website to map the entities cleanly.
8. Had the newly created pages indexed by Google.

Warnings from the real run

Three lessons learned the hard way:

1. Do not publish a lot of content at once. Google can penalise you for large content dumps. Improve quality of content (reduce bounce rate) gradually. Update, improve, or create new content over time, not in one batch.
2. Optimise for your content category, not ours. This run optimised for a blog / comparison portal. Your B2B SaaS, e-commerce, or agency site needs a different blueprint.
3. The foundation of GEO remains SEO. If your pages are not indexed by Google, they will not be found by AI engines. SEO hygiene is the prerequisite, not the alternative.

This experiment ran the full 90-day loop in compressed time. The sequence (baseline → top URL analysis → content creation via AI-Citable Rules → grounding pages → indexing) is the same sequence you should run.

Deep-dive fix tracks: Module 4 (SEO), Module 5 (Content), Module 6 (PR).

Module 8 recap

Systems survive turnover. Memory does not. The team that wins GEO in 12 months is not the one with the biggest budget. It is the one with the most boring, most reliable cadence.