Your 90-Day AI Visibility Campaign Checklist

Introduction: Your Playbook for Winning in AI Search

Improving your brand's AI visibility is a fundamentally different challenge than traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While SEO focuses on ranking a list of links for users to click, AI search optimization (AISO) is about influencing the information that generative AI models synthesize into direct answers. These models, like ChatGPT and Google AI Overview, consume content from multiple sources to construct a single, coherent response, making your content's clarity, authority, and structure more critical than ever. As noted by industry analysts, this shift means businesses must adapt their strategies to articulate value in a way AI can effectively communicate and cite [1].

For many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), understanding this new landscape is one thing, but having the resources to act on it is another. This creates what we call the AI Visibility Execution Gap—the significant divide between knowing what needs to be done and having the time, budget, and specialized skills to do it. This 90-day checklist is your actionable playbook designed to bridge that gap. It provides a clear, step-by-step project plan that demystifies the process, whether you plan to execute it in-house or simply want to understand the true scope of work involved.

The goal is to give you a complete plan to measurably improve how AI models perceive, trust, and recommend your brand. However, before you start any journey, you need to know your starting point. The crucial first step is to establish a clear baseline of your current performance. Get your free AI Visibility One-Pager to see how your brand appears in AI-generated answers today.

Phase 1 (Weeks 1-4): Audit and Technical Foundations

This initial phase is about discovery and preparation. You'll establish your baseline, analyze the competitive landscape in AI search, and ensure your website's technical health is optimized for AI crawlers and retrieval systems. Getting these foundations right is non-negotiable for long-term success.

Week 1 Task: Baseline & Competitor Analysis

Start by getting your free AI Visibility One-Pager from Searchify to understand your current visibility score, share of voice, and sentiment. This report will serve as your benchmark. Use its insights to identify your top three competitors in AI-generated answers—be prepared, as these may be different from your traditional SEO competitors. Your goal is to understand who AI models currently trust for your target customer questions.

• Estimated Time: 4 hours
• Required Skillset: Marketing Strategist

Week 2 Task: Technical Health Audit

A healthy website is a trustworthy website. Follow a structured process like the DIY AI Visibility Audit to check for and fix critical technical issues. Pay close attention to structured data (schema), as it acts as a translator for AI, providing clear, organized information about your content [2]. Also, prioritize site speed and Core Web Vitals, as AI systems favor sites that provide a fast, seamless user experience [3].

• Estimated Time: 8-10 hours
• Required Skillset: Technical SEO

Week 3 Task: Content & 'Chunk-Level' Audit

AI models don't read entire pages; they break them down into passages or "chunks" for retrieval. Review your top 10-15 existing pages and assess if each section is a self-contained chunk that can be easily extracted. According to guidance on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), chunks that are too small may lack context, while oversized chunks can lead to inaccuracies [4]. Identify content that is vague, overly promotional, or lacks clear, descriptive headings that signal its purpose.

• Estimated Time: 6 hours
• Required Skillset: Content Strategist

Week 4 Task: Develop Your AI Visibility Strategy

Using insights from your audits, map out one or two topic clusters. A topic cluster consists of a central 'pillar' page covering a broad topic and 3-5 supporting 'cluster' pages that delve into specific sub-topics. This structure helps establish your topical authority [5]. Focus on topic clusters that address key customer questions your competitors are currently winning in AI answers.

• Estimated Time: 5 hours
• Required Skillset: Marketing Strategist

Phase 2 (Weeks 5-8): Foundational Content and Authority Building

With your strategy defined, this phase shifts to execution. You will create the high-quality, citation-worthy content needed to establish your brand as an authority. This includes developing comprehensive pillar pages, detailed cluster content, and a unique, data-backed asset to signal expertise.

Week 5 Task: Draft Pillar Content

Write the comprehensive pillar page for your first topic cluster. This page should be the definitive resource on the topic. Focus on providing substantial depth, organizing it with a clear structure, and using fact-based, non-promotional language. The goal is to create a highly citation-worthy asset that AI models will see as a primary source of truth.

• Estimated Time: 12-15 hours
• Required Skillset: Content Writing

Week 6 Task: Draft Cluster Content (Part 1)

Write the first two to three supporting blog posts or articles for your pillar page. Each piece of cluster content should cover a specific sub-topic in-depth, answering a narrow set of questions completely. Remember to optimize each section for chunk-level retrieval, ensuring every paragraph or short section can be understood independently.

• Estimated Time: 10-14 hours
• Required Skillset: Content Writing

Week 7 Task: Create a Citable Asset

To truly stand out, you need to create original, data-backed content. As experts at Moz note, proprietary research is a powerful way to build authority in an era flooded with generic content. This asset could be a small industry survey, a unique statistic derived from your internal data, or a compilation of expert quotes. This becomes a powerful signal to AI models that you are a source of primary information.

• Estimated Time: 8 hours
• Required Skillset: Marketing Strategist / Content Creator

Week 8 Task: Finalize and Edit All Content

Review all content drafted over the past three weeks. Check for clarity, accuracy, and tone. Most importantly, ensure it aligns with Google's E-E-A-T principles: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. According to Google's own documentation, demonstrating these qualities is key to creating helpful, people-first content that its systems are designed to reward.

• Estimated Time: 6 hours
• Required Skillset: Content Writing / Editor

Phase 3 (Weeks 9-12): Amplification, Monitoring, and Optimization

Creating great content is only half the battle. This final phase focuses on publishing your work, amplifying its reach, and establishing a feedback loop. You'll monitor your progress, analyze the results, and use that data to refine your strategy for the next cycle.

Week 9 Task: Publish and Implement Internal Linking

Publish your new pillar page and cluster content. As you do, strategically link from the cluster pages up to the pillar page and from the pillar page down to the relevant clusters. This hub-and-spoke model creates a web of interconnected knowledge, signaling a strong semantic relationship to search engines and AI crawlers, which enhances your site's perceived authority on the subject [6].

• Estimated Time: 4 hours
• Required Skillset: Technical SEO / Content Manager

Week 10 Task: Initial Content Amplification and Outreach

Promote your new content, with a special focus on the citable asset from Week 7. Share it on relevant social media channels and begin targeted outreach. Identify 5-10 relevant industry blogs, journalists, or influencers who cover your topic and might find your original data useful. A study by Fractl found that personalized outreach emails received positive feedback 83% of the time, proving that a tailored approach is far more effective than mass-blasting.

• Estimated Time: 8 hours
• Required Skillset: PR / Outreach Specialist

Week 11 Task: Monitor AI Visibility Changes

Now it's time to measure the impact. Use a platform like Searchify to track changes in your brand's visibility, share of voice, and sentiment for your target questions. Check if your new pillar and cluster content is being surfaced in AI answers or cited as a source. This ongoing monitoring is essential for understanding what's working.

• Estimated Time: 3 hours (ongoing)
• Required Skillset: Marketing Strategist

Week 12 Task: Analyze, Refine, and Plan Next Cycle

Review the performance of your 90-day campaign. Did your visibility score improve? Are you being cited for your target topics? Use the data from your monitoring to identify successes and remaining gaps. This analysis will inform the topic cluster you choose for your next 90-day sprint, creating a continuous improvement cycle known as the AI Visibility Flywheel.

• Estimated Time: 5 hours
• Required Skillset: Marketing Strategist

Conclusion: The Execution Gap is Real, But You Have Options

As this 90-day plan illustrates, a successful AI visibility strategy requires a significant and sustained effort. The blend of strategic planning, technical optimization, deep content creation, and persistent outreach is precisely what defines the AI Visibility Execution Gap—it's a demanding process that often exceeds the capacity of small marketing teams.

This playbook provides the path to success, but executing it requires a diverse skillset and dozens of hours per month. Recognizing this challenge, Searchify offers two distinct solutions. First, the Searchify platform, with its Action Center and monitoring tools, empowers your team to manage this entire process efficiently and effectively. Second, for teams that lack the time or in-house expertise, Searchify's full-service add-on acts as your dedicated AI visibility team, executing this entire playbook for you at a fraction of the cost of a traditional agency.

No matter which path you choose, the journey starts with understanding where you stand. Get your free, no-obligation AI Visibility One-Pager today to get your baseline and take the first, most important step toward winning in the new era of search.

Get Your Free AI Visibility Report