The 90-day GEO roadmap

Weeks 1 to 2: the baseline

Nothing on the site changes in the first two weeks. You write down the questions your buyers ask and record what four assistants answer today; a fix you cannot compare against a starting point is a guess. It borrows the shape of how we measure a client (a fixed panel, every answer kept word for word, the same questions again later), sized for one person and two or three evenings.

1. Write ten to twelve questions the way a buyer types them, not the way you describe yourself: the problem question ("who fixes a leaking water heater in Mesa on a Sunday"), the comparison question ("most trusted family dentist near downtown Tucson") and one that names you ("is [your company name] any good").
2. Put every question to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, three times each. Answers vary between runs, which is why one run tells you little.
3. For each answer, record four things in a sheet: named (yes or no), recommended (yes or no), first (yes or no) and who else was named. Paste the answer verbatim in a fifth column.
4. Save the addresses of the businesses named instead of you; you come back to them in week 11.
5. Date the sheet and leave the questions alone; two months compare only when the questions are identical.

Weeks 3 to 6: the foundation

The next four weeks make the business something a machine can pin down and read. In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros, September 2026), 43.1% were inconsistent about who and where they are across their own three main pages, and 17.8% carried no structured data at all. Both are text-editor fixes.

1. Week 3: settle one name, one street address, one phone number and one set of hours, and write them identically in the footer, on the contact page, on the about page and in your Google Business Profile; 36.9% of audited sites publish more than one phone number. The consistency audit is this week's worksheet.
2. Week 4: add LocalBusiness schema, or the specific subtype for your trade (Dentist, Plumber, LegalService, AutoRepair), as JSON-LD on the homepage, with name, address, telephone, openingHoursSpecification, areaServed and url filled in and matching the visible page word for word. Google's local business page lists the properties it reads, its structured data guidance is to mark up only what the visitor can see, and schema.org lists the subtypes.
3. Week 5: open /robots.txt and run the crawler access check. The answer-side tokens (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Googlebot) should be allowed. Then fetch your homepage as one of those user agents and confirm a page, not a challenge; 7.2% of audited sites served our crawler a bot wall, and the setting that raises it lives in the CDN.
4. Week 6: view the source of your service pages with scripts off. If the words you sell with are not in the HTML, move them there. Anything that lives only in a PDF (a price list, a service menu) gets a page of its own as text.

Weeks 7 to 12: the answers and the mentions

With the site readable, the remaining six weeks give the assistants something to quote. 61.5% of the audited sites had no question-and-answer content of any kind, and 64.7% showed no review signal a crawler could read. Answers and visible reviews are the levers a business holds on its own pages; mentions elsewhere it does not.

1. Weeks 7 to 8: write the five questions your buyers ask on the phone as headings, each with a real answer of 40 to 80 words directly under it, on the page for the service it concerns; the answer-page template is the shape. One page per service, not all of them on the homepage.
2. Week 9: put two or three real reviews on the page as text, with the reviewer's first name, the date and the platform they came from. Leave the platform's rating out of your markup, because Google's review snippet rules say not to aggregate ratings from other websites.
3. Week 10: list where your trade is discussed in your metro: the trade association's member directory, the two or three review sites buyers in your trade open, the neighborhood forum where people ask for a name. Get your listing on each identical to the site. You cannot write the mentions yourself; you can make sure the name people use is the one on your door.
4. Week 11: reopen the competitors' pages you saved in week 1 and note what they state plainly that you do not: a price or a range, the area served, the hours, how to book, a license number. Add whichever you can state truthfully.
5. Week 12: date every page you changed, check the internal links, and fetch the changed pages once more the way a crawler would.

Day 90: the re-measure

On day 90, run the same ten to twelve questions against the same four assistants, three times each, and fill in the same four columns. Compare the two sheets question by question. An assistant that now names you for the comparison question but not for the problem question is telling you which page to work on next.

1. Run the panel exactly as in week 1: same questions, same assistants, three runs.
2. Mark each question up, down or unchanged for named, recommended and first.
3. Where you are still absent, read the verbatim answers and note what was named instead and what its page states that yours does not.
4. Set the next 90 days from those gaps, and keep the panel unchanged so the third measurement compares with the first two.

The roadmap removes the reasons an assistant could not name you and gives it something to quote once it can. It does not place you in an answer, because no agency has a lever inside these systems. What it gives you on day 90 is a number to set beside day 1.