The 90-day local visibility plan.
The sequence we run in client engagements, laid out for an owner to work through alone. Three phases, one focus each, roughly two hours a week.
Ninety days is the shortest window in which AI visibility work produces measurable movement. Engines need time to crawl, retrieve, and trust changes, and citation behavior typically starts shifting 60 to 90 days after the work lands. This plan sequences the work so the slow-compounding moves start first and the before-and-after comparison actually holds up.
The order is the point. Every audit we run finds the same pattern: businesses publish content on a foundation that cannot support it, then wonder why nothing moves. Identity first, structure second, content third, corroboration alongside, measurement throughout.
You cannot rush trust, but you can stop delaying it. Everything in this plan is either free or already yours to fix.
Set the baseline you’ll measure against.
One sitting, about an hour. Build your prompt set: the questions a ready-to-buy customer asks at each stage, discovery through branded. Run each one in a private window across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google, where the AI answer is now the default experience. Screenshot every answer, note who was named and which sources were cited, and file it with the date. This is the before picture, and in 90 days it is the only evidence that matters.
Foundation: one business, verifiable everywhere
The unglamorous month. Nothing here is visible to customers, and everything later depends on it. An engine has to be able to verify you to cite you.
Unify your business identity
Rebuild your Google Business Profile field by field
Add schema markup
Fix crawlability and page structure
Content: publish the answers, starting with price
Now the foundation can support weight. This month you publish the pages engines lift passages from, in the order buyers ask.
Publish your pricing page
Deepen your two money service pages
Write the cornerstone guide
Add the FAQ layer
Corroboration and the re-run
Engines trust what independent sources confirm. This month builds the agreement around your claims, then measures what moved.
Complete the directories your category leans on
Rebuild the review pattern
Put one proof asset on a platform you don’t own
Re-run the baseline and read the movement
The arithmetic.
With existing content and authority, citation behavior usually starts shifting inside this window. Building from very little, the 90 days lay the foundation and the visibility shifts start to land in the following quarter. Answers vary run to run on every engine, so judge frequency across the fixed prompt set, and hold the set steady so the comparison holds up.
If day 90 shows no movement anywhere, the plan did not fail silently: the re-run tells you exactly which layer is stuck. That is also where the formal audit can help, because the fix is usually structural and specific to you.
The moves that work, every Thursday. Free.
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Before you start.
How much time does this actually take?
Plan on roughly two hours a week, with weeks 7 and 8 heavier because of the cornerstone guide. The two exceptions worth delegating are schema installation, which needs whoever maintains your website, and the guide itself if writing is not your strength.
Can I skip the foundation month and start with content?
You can, and it is the most common mistake we see in audits. Content published on an inconsistent identity and an unstructured site earns a fraction of its potential citations, because the engine cannot verify who wrote it. The first month is what makes the second month work.
Do I need to buy any tools?
No. Every tool the plan references, the Prompt Set Builder, the Entity Consistency Check, the Schema Builder, and the Citation Check, is free on this site, and the measurement is manual prompt runs in a private window. Paid tracking tools automate the measurement, and they are worth it for an agency or an ongoing engagement, but the plan does not require one.
What if I already rank well in regular Google search?
Then you will likely see movement faster, especially in Google AI Overviews, which correlate with existing rankings. Your gap is usually that pages written to rank are not written to be quoted. The structure and content months matter most for you.
What order do the engines respond in?
In our tracking, Perplexity usually registers new pages first because it retrieves live on nearly every question. Google AI Overviews follow where you have index standing. ChatGPT tends to move last on unbranded questions. Judge the whole set at day 90, not any single engine.
What happens after day 90?
The plan becomes a cycle: re-run the baseline quarterly, keep the review and posting cadences running, and add one substantial content piece per month against the next prompt-set gap. If you would rather have the layer owned for you, that starts with the AI Visibility Audit, since every partnership begins from one, and your day-90 re-run will make it a well-informed conversation.
Anna Curry is the founder of Top of Search, a marketing consultancy in Wilmington, NC that helps owner-operated local businesses get cited by AI search engines. She has worked in marketing since 2008 and writes Cited, a weekly newsletter on AI visibility for local business owners.
Want the 90 days scored before you start?
The audit runs your business against real customer prompts across five engines and hands you this plan already prioritized for your gaps, with the baseline built.