Day 1: write your ten buyer questions
Everything this week is measured against these, so they come first. Buyers do not type your company name; they type a problem, a place and a constraint, and the questions have to be written that way to be worth running.
- Write three problem questions: what someone types when the thing is broken or needed ("who repairs a heat pump in Boise", "emergency dentist open Saturday near Kitsilano").
- Write three comparison questions: "best" or "most trusted" plus your trade and your metro.
- Write two constraint questions with the thing buyers in your trade always ask about: evenings, insurance accepted, same-day, financing.
- Write two that name you and one that names your nearest competitor, so you can see how each of you is described.
Done when: ten to twelve questions in a sheet, dated, in the buyer's words rather than yours.
Day 2: run them and record what comes back
Put each question to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, in a fresh chat, exactly as written. Once each is enough for today. Answers vary between runs, so repeat this day once or twice more this month and see which names hold; the panel we run for clients handles the same drift by dating every reading and comparing each with the baseline.
- Record four things per answer: 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, so any verdict can be checked later.
- Open the sites of the businesses named instead of you and keep the tabs; you will want them on day 5.
Done when: 40 to 48 answers recorded and a dated baseline you can repeat on day 30.
Day 3: one identity everywhere
In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros, September 2026), 43.1% contradicted themselves about who and where they are across their own three main pages, and 36.9% published more than one phone number. Today removes that reason to leave you out.
- Choose one name, one street address, one phone number and one set of hours.
- Write them identically in the footer, on the contact page, on the about page and in the title tag; the footer does most of the work because it is on every page.
- Match your Google Business Profile to the site. Its guidelines ask for the real name, the real address, the right categories and the real hours.
- Leave the directories for another day; the consistency audit is the worksheet when you get to them.
Done when: a stranger opening any page of the site and the profile reads the same four facts.
Day 4: the markup
17.8% of the audited sites had no schema.org markup at all, and most of the rest described the website rather than the business. Today puts a LocalBusiness node on the homepage; it is ten minutes for whoever can edit the head of the page.
- Write the node as JSON-LD: name, address as a PostalAddress, telephone, url, openingHoursSpecification, areaServed. Use the specific subtype if schema.org has one for your trade (Dentist, Plumber, LegalService, AutoRepair).
- Paste it into the head of the homepage as a script of type
application/ld+json; every page builder has a place for this. - Check every value against the visible page. Google's guidance is to mark up only what the visitor can see, and JSON-LD is the format it recommends.
Done when: view source shows the block, and every value in it equals what is printed on the page.
Day 5: the five answers
61.5% of the audited sites had no question-and-answer content of any kind, and 50.7% had a heading phrased as a question with no answer under it a machine could isolate. Today writes five real ones, in the words you use on the phone.
- Pick the five questions buyers ask before they book; day 1's list has most of them.
- Write each as a heading on the page for the service it concerns, with an answer of 40 to 80 words in plain sentences directly under it. Answer first, detail after.
- Put the fact the buyer wanted inside the answer: the price or range, the area, the hours, how to book.
- If you want the shape of a whole page, the answer-page template is a filled example.
Done when: five headings that are questions, and five answers you could read aloud to the customer who asked.
Day 6: reviews onto the page
64.7% of the audited sites showed no review signal a crawler could read, and 8.9% carried rating markup. Most of these businesses have reviews; the site does not say so, and a fetch of the site returns the site, not the platform.
- Choose two or three real reviews and quote them as text, with the reviewer's first name, the date and the platform, and link the platform page.
- Put each review on the service page it concerns, not only on the homepage.
- Leave AggregateRating off the node from day 4. Google's review snippet rules say not to aggregate ratings from other websites, and a business's reviews of itself on its own site earn no stars, so the quotes in step 1 are the part that counts.
Done when: a crawler reading the page sees the words of the reviews, who wrote them, when, and on which platform.
Day 7: check the door, then book the re-measure
Everything above is invisible if a crawler cannot reach it. 7.2% of the audited sites served our crawler a challenge page instead of the site; 3.0% rendered their text only in JavaScript; 3.2% disallowed AI crawlers in robots.txt on purpose.
- Run the crawler access check on your domain. The answer-side tokens (OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot, Googlebot) should be allowed.
- Fetch your homepage with one of those user agents (
curl -A "OAI-SearchBot" -I https://www.example.com/) and confirm a 200 page, not a challenge. If it is a challenge, the setting is in your CDN's bot management, where the tokens can usually be allowed by name. - View the source of a service page with scripts off and confirm the five answers and the reviews are in the HTML.
- Put a date in the calendar 30 days out to repeat day 2 with the same questions, and another 30 days after that.
Done when: the check shows the answer-side tokens allowed, the fetch returns a page, and the re-measure is booked.