Week 1 to 2: Measure
Baseline measurement: ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews your most important customer questions and write down where you're missing and who gets recommended instead. That list becomes your task list — not a guess about what "AI SEO" should mean.
Week 3 to 6: Foundation
Clean up contradictions across your own pages, make the site easy for both people and crawlers to parse, and build the first dedicated answer pages for the questions you're currently losing. Google has said no special markup or AI-specific files are required for AI Overviews or AI Mode — so this phase is about clarity and consistency, not chasing a magic tag.
Week 7 to 12: Reach
Build genuine mentions in directories, media, and communities, publish more answer pages, and actively collect reviews. Third-party mentions of your brand track much more closely with AI citation rates than backlinks do, so this is where the real leverage sits. Then run the second measurement.
Day 90: Comparison
Baseline versus current state: what moved, which effort actually worked, what comes next? From here the project turns into a routine you repeat every quarter.