GEO is not a project. It is an operating change.
Here is the 90-day plan. The cadence is calibrated. The deliverables are sequenced. The measurement is built in from day one.
Days 1–14 — Diagnose
The first two weeks are spent measuring the starting position. Without a baseline, every later decision is guesswork.
Citation Share audit. Run 50 brand-relevant queries across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Score citation frequency, position, sentiment, and competitive overlap. Identify the queries where the brand is absent, the queries where it is misrepresented, and the queries where it is winning.
Competitive benchmark. Run the same 50 queries against the top three to five competitors. Document the citation gap. Identify the sources driving competitor citations — which publications, which Wikipedia depth, which Reddit threads, which Substack authors.
Entity audit. Inventory the brand's entity stack. Wikipedia entry depth and accuracy. Wikidata entry completeness. Crunchbase profile state. LinkedIn Company completeness. Google Knowledge Graph status. Schema validation across owned properties.
Source audit. Identify the top 20 publications and platforms driving citations in the category. Map current brand presence on each. Identify the gap list.
The deliverable is a baseline report — Citation Share scores, gap analysis, prioritized opportunity map, and the 90-day plan that follows.
Days 15–30 — Schema and Entity
Layers one and two of the GEO Stack go in first. They are the foundation. Without them, later content work compounds less efficiently.
Schema rollout. Implement Article, Organization, Person, FAQPage, HowTo, Product, and BreadcrumbList schema across owned properties. Validate every page against Schema.org and Google's Rich Results Test. Build the maintenance protocol so new content ships with schema applied.
Wikipedia overhaul. Expand the brand's Wikipedia entry to meet notability thresholds. Add primary-source citations to every claim. Build out founder, executive, and product-line subsections where notability supports them. Link to Wikidata. Cross-reference to authoritative entity surfaces.
Wikidata buildout. Create or expand the brand's Wikidata entry. Add sameAs links to all major entity surfaces. Populate the structured properties — founding date, headquarters, key personnel, product lines, parent organization.
Crunchbase cleanup. Complete the company profile. Add funding history, leadership, products, news. Link to all authoritative external sources.
Knowledge Graph claim. If the brand does not already have a Google Knowledge Graph panel, work through the claim and verification process. If it has one, audit it for accuracy.
By day 30, the brand has a structured, parseable identity across the entity surfaces. The engines now have something to work with.
Days 31–60 — Citation Infrastructure
Layer three goes in. The retrieval anchors get built.
Press release format overhaul. Implement the retrieval-anchor template across all outbound releases. Entity-dense headlines. Quantified bodies. FAQ sections. Primary-source citations. Schema-applied distribution.
Primary research. Commission and publish the first primary research output — a survey, index, or benchmark study relevant to the category. Distribute through wire services, pitch to Tier-1 publications, syndicate across owned properties.
Reddit strategy. Build the engagement plan. Identify the subreddits where the category is discussed. Establish presence within community guidelines. Seed authoritative content where appropriate — never promotional, always value-additive.
Substack and long-form authority. Identify the founder, executive, or in-house expert who will own long-form authority. Build the publication cadence. Cross-link to owned properties. Establish a six-month editorial calendar.
Structured FAQ rollout. Build comprehensive FAQ pages on every category-relevant topic across owned properties. Apply FAQPage schema. Optimize for direct-answer retrieval.
By day 60, the brand has retrieval anchors live across multiple surfaces. The engines now have current content to surface.
Days 61–90 — Authority Compounding
Layer four work begins. This is the longest-tail layer, but the early moves are the most important.
Tier-1 earned media campaign. Build the press strategy around the publications that carry highest LLM weight in the category. Time the campaign around the primary research release. Coordinate with the Wikipedia expansion so new citations can be added to the entry as they publish.
Expert positioning. Place the brand's named experts inside trade research, analyst reports, and academic citation surfaces. Identify the McKinsey reports, BCG reports, Pew studies, and Gallup polls where the brand should be a source.
Trade body participation. Identify the trade associations and standards bodies relevant to the category. Build the participation plan — working groups, comment letters, conference panels, named contributions to standards documentation.
Re-audit. At day 90, re-run the Citation Share audit. Compare against the day-zero baseline. Measure the movement. Calibrate the next 90 days.
Measurement That Matters
Three metrics report monthly.
Citation Share. Percentage of relevant queries where the brand is named, scored per engine and weighted by query value.
Position Index. Average position of brand mention within the response — first, second, third, or later.
Competitive delta. Brand Citation Share minus the top competitor's Citation Share, scored per engine.
These three metrics now appear on the marketing dashboard alongside reach, frequency, and ROAS.
Budget and Team
The 90-day program runs across four functions: a developer team for schema and entity infrastructure, a content team for retrieval-anchor production, an earned-media team for Tier-1 placement and authority work, and an analyst team for measurement and audit.
For most brands, the in-house capability for one or two of these functions exists. The remaining functions get outsourced.
What Changes After Day 90
The work transitions from project to operating discipline. Quarterly re-audits. Monthly content cadence. Continuous entity maintenance. Ongoing earned-media compounding.
The first 90 days build the foundation. The next 12 months build the lead. The lead compounds for as long as the operating discipline holds.
Day one is the audit. Day 91 is the re-audit. The leaderboard is forming now.
