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The 30-Day Roadmap

Core behavior: baseline → fix → re-test → measure improvement.

This is the take-home artifact of the entire engagement. Everything up to this point — the measurement model, the live session, the optimization playbook — exists to populate this four-week plan with real, specific tasks instead of generic best practices.

important

Week 1 includes running the actual Citation Monitor baseline, not just building the list. An earlier version of this roadmap built the Citation List in Week 1 but deferred the first Citation Monitor run to Week 4 — which meant there was no pre-improvement score to compare the Week 4 re-test against. The entire point of the measurement loop is a real before and after; you can't prove anything moved if you never measured where it started. In practice, the Week 1 baseline run happens as pre-work before the live session, and the live session is where you present it — see The Agenda.

Week 1: Baseline​

Reports: Citation Monitor (initial run), Agent-Readiness Audit, first Citation List

  • Build the first Citation List — manually for a Prospect-track client, or (Existing Customer) via Generate a Citation List from Q&A if a Q&A Analysis report already exists
  • Run Citation Monitor against that list now. This is the number Week 4 gets compared against — record the Citation Health Score and verdict tier and treat it as fixed history from this point forward
  • Run Agent-Readiness Audit against the primary domain — if llms.txt is missing, publish the generated starter file immediately; this is consistently the single highest-impact, lowest-effort fix available in week 1
  • Existing Customer track only: open AI Referral Analytics and record the current AI Referral Sessions total, Engagement Rate, and top-3 landing pages — the "before" traffic number every later week gets compared against

Week 2: Questions​

Reports: Q&A Analysis — Existing Customer track only; see the Prospect-track alternative below

  • Existing Customer track: run Q&A Analysis on the last 1–3 months of chatbot conversations. Review the IDK rate and the Poorly Answered Themes section — these are the fastest, most concrete content wins available, because the questions and the gap are both already known verbatim. Pull the top 20 Citation Phrase Suggestions and merge any new ones into the Week 1 Citation List. Draft or publish the highest-priority FAQ answers the report recommends — real engagements typically surface 3–5 High-impact, Low-effort FAQ answers in this step alone.
  • Prospect track: there's no conversation history to mine yet, so this week is spent refining the manually-built question list against early competitor and Citation Monitor findings, and — if the client is moving toward becoming an ai12z customer — standing up a trial bot specifically to unlock Keyword Visibility for Week 4.

Week 3: Pages​

Reports: Site-Wide Sweep, then URL Analysis on priority landing pages

  • Run Site-Wide Sweep first — it's free to run and takes seconds, and it triages the whole site so URL Analysis isn't spent guessing which pages matter most
  • Take the weakest pages from the Sweep's bottom-20%-by-rank list and run full URL Analysis audits against the 3–5 highest-traffic ones (Existing Customer track: cross-reference against Week 1's AI Referral Analytics landing-page data — a page already receiving AI-referred traffic is a higher-priority fix than one that isn't)
  • Action the highest-priority findings from each: typically missing schema, weak Answer-First Structure, and vague/generic language flagged by Entity Density scoring

Week 4: Re-Test​

Reports: Citation Monitor (re-run), Keyword Visibility (if available), Consolidated Action Plan

  • Run Citation Monitor again against the same Citation List built in Week 1 and expanded in Week 2 — this is the step that actually proves whether the month's work moved anything, and it works because Week 1 already established the "before"
  • Run Keyword Visibility against the same Keyword List, if one exists, to check whether the Format Delta and answer quality improved
  • Run the Consolidated Action Plan to pull every remaining open item — from all reports run this month — into one ranked list
  • Schedule the next 30-day cycle's Week 1 before this session ends; the loop only stays a loop if the next iteration is already on the calendar

Adapting the Roadmap​

Two honest adjustments to mention to the client:

  • If a brand is starting from zero (Prospect track), Week 1's Agent-Readiness fix and Week 2's manual-question refinement are almost always the two highest-leverage, lowest-effort actions available — prioritize those over anything in Week 3 if time is short.
  • If a brand already has a mature GEO practice, compress Weeks 1–3 into a single sprint and spend the extra time in Week 4 on GEO Trend Comparison against the prior month, since the marginal value of a fresh audit is lower than the value of confirming trend direction.
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