Your First 90 Days in AI Visibility: A Step-by-Step Plan

Introduction: Your Roadmap to AI Search Success

The way customers discover businesses is undergoing a fundamental shift. For years, success was defined by ranking on a list of ten blue links. Today, with the rise of AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews, that model is becoming obsolete. As reported by industry analysis, the appearance of AI Overviews can cause organic click-through rates to drop significantly, with some studies showing a 61% decline for certain queries [1]. Traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no longer enough to guarantee you'll be found.

This new landscape requires a focus on AI Visibility. In simple terms, AI visibility is about ensuring your brand, products, and services are seen, understood, and recommended in AI-generated answers. It’s about becoming a trusted source that AI models rely on to inform their users.

The practice of improving this visibility is called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), or AI Search Optimization (AISO). While the acronyms might be new, the goal is familiar: connect with customers where they are searching. For a small or medium-sized business (SMB), this might sound like another complex marketing channel to master. However, getting started is more manageable than you think.

This 90-day plan is your roadmap. It’s a step-by-step approach designed for any business to build a strong foundation in AI search without needing a large budget or a dedicated team.

Month 1 (Days 1-30): Building Your Foundation

The first month is dedicated to discovery and data. Before you can improve your AI visibility, you need to understand where you stand today and, more importantly, what your customers are actually asking these new AI engines. The goal is to establish a clear baseline to measure all future efforts against.

Step 1: How to Discover What Your Customers Ask AI

In traditional SEO, marketers focus on keywords. In the world of AI search, the focus shifts to questions. Your customers are having conversations with AI, asking for recommendations, solutions, and comparisons in natural language. Your first task is to uncover these questions. This involves moving beyond keyword research tools and thinking about user intent. What problems are they trying to solve? What information are they seeking before making a purchase? For a detailed methodology, you can explore our playbook on identifying customer questions.

Step 2: Establish Your AI Visibility Baseline

You cannot improve what you do not measure. A baseline analysis shows you how your brand currently appears (or doesn't appear) in AI-generated answers for your most important customer questions. It reveals your current share of voice, highlights where you are being cited, and uncovers the initial gaps in your strategy. This data-driven foundation is critical for prioritizing your efforts effectively.

The most direct way to complete this step is by generating a baseline report. Start Day 1 of your 90-day plan with a free AI visibility one-pager from Searchify. This personalized report analyzes your website and shows you your current brand mentions, competitor performance, and critical content gaps related to your key customer questions.

Step 3: Identify Your True AI Competitors

One of the most common surprises for businesses starting with AI visibility is discovering who their real competitors are. The brands, publications, and forums that an AI model cites in its answers are often different from the direct business competitors you track for traditional SEO. Your baseline report will illuminate these AI competitors, showing you who is currently capturing the conversation around your products and services. Understanding who you are truly up against is essential for building a strategy to win back that visibility. To learn more about tracking these new competitors, see our guide on AI competitor tracking tools.

Month 2 (Days 31-60): Optimization and Action

With a clear understanding of your baseline, Month 2 is all about taking action. This phase focuses on making targeted improvements to your website and content based on the insights gathered in Month 1. The goal is to tackle the low-hanging fruit that will have the most significant impact on how AI models perceive and process your information.

Step 4: How to Optimize Content for AI 'Chunking'

AI models don't read web pages like humans do. They use a process often related to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), where they break down content into smaller passages or "chunks" to find the most relevant information [2]. To improve your chances of being included in an AI answer, you must make your content easy to digest. Structure your articles and web pages with clear, descriptive headings. Keep each paragraph focused on a single, core idea. This makes each section a self-contained, understandable chunk that an AI can easily extract and synthesize into a response.

Step 5: Address Critical Technical Health

A technically sound website is more easily crawled and understood by AI systems. While technical SEO can be complex, a few high-impact items make a big difference for AI visibility. One of the most important is schema markup, a type of structured data that acts like a translator, telling AI engines exactly what your content is about [3]. For example, you can use schema to label your business address, product prices, or author information explicitly. Ensuring your site is mobile-friendly and loads quickly are also foundational elements. For a more comprehensive list, you can reference our technical SEO checklist for AI.

Step 6: Fill Your First Content Gaps

Your baseline report from Month 1 likely identified key customer questions where your brand is not visible. Now is the time to address one of them. Choose a high-priority question and create a dedicated blog post or FAQ page that answers it directly and comprehensively. Apply the 'chunking' principles from Step 4, using clear headings and focused paragraphs. This targeted content creation directly addresses a known weakness and demonstrates to AI models that you are an authority on the topic. For a deeper dive into this process, review our guide on AI content gap analysis.

Month 3 (Days 61-90): Monitoring and Iteration

The final month of your initial 90-day push is focused on sustainability. AI visibility is not a one-time project; it's an ongoing process of monitoring, learning, and improving. This phase is about establishing a cycle that will allow you to build on your initial success and adapt as AI models evolve.

Step 7: How to Monitor Your AI Visibility

After making changes in Month 2, you need to track whether they are working. Are you appearing for more questions? Has your share of voice increased? Are you being cited more often? You can perform this monitoring manually by asking AI models your target questions, but this can be time-consuming and inconsistent. This is where automated monitoring platforms become essential, as they can track your visibility across multiple AI engines and questions, saving you time and providing reliable data on your progress.

Step 8: Build an Iterative Improvement Cycle

Treat AI visibility as a continuous loop: Analyze, Act, Measure, Repeat. Use the data from your monitoring efforts to identify the next opportunity. Perhaps a new competitor has emerged, or your customers have started asking a new set of questions. Each cycle of improvement will further solidify your brand's authority and presence in AI-generated answers. This iterative approach ensures your strategy remains agile and effective over the long term.

Step 9: Plan Your Next 90 Days

As you conclude your first 90 days, think about how to scale your efforts. Based on your initial results, you can build a business case for dedicating more resources to AI visibility. As your needs grow, you may consider moving from manual processes to a dedicated platform or even a hybrid service model that combines software with expert execution. This allows your team to focus on strategy while a partner handles the implementation, a model that provides significant value for growing businesses. You can learn more about this approach in our guide to hybrid AISO services.

Your DIY AI Visibility Toolkit

Getting started doesn't require a massive budget. Here is a simple, effective starter kit for any SMB ready to tackle AI visibility.

• Baseline & Monitoring: Searchify's Free AI Visibility One-Pager. This is the best place to start your 90-day plan, giving you an instant snapshot of where you stand.
• Question Research: Tools like AnswerThePublic and Google Trends are excellent for discovering what people are searching for. Don't forget to browse forums like Reddit or Quora, which are goldmines for customer questions.
• Content Structure & SEO: Ahrefs' free webmaster tools can help you audit your site's technical health. For those on WordPress, the free version of the Yoast SEO plugin is a great tool for improving readability and basic on-page optimization.

Conclusion: Start Your AI Visibility Journey Today

The rise of AI search represents a significant change, but it doesn't have to be an intimidating one. By breaking the process down into a manageable journey—Foundation, Optimization, and Iteration—any business can take control of its presence in this new landscape.

The path to visibility in AI-generated answers is clear and achievable with a structured plan. By focusing on understanding customer questions, creating helpful and well-structured content, and continuously monitoring your progress, you can position your brand as a trusted source for the next generation of search.

Don't wait for your competitors to get ahead. Start Day 1 of your 90-day plan now by getting your free, personalized AI Visibility One-Pager.