A 30-day AI visibility plan for a local business

AI answers change when their sources change. That means AI visibility work is really source work — and a month is enough to move the three source families that carry most local recommendations. Here's the sequence we'd run.

Week 1 — Baseline, honestly measured

Run an unbranded scan (ten buyer questions that never mention your name) and save the results: who was recommended, and which URLs were cited. This is your before picture. Resist the urge to fix anything until you can see which sources the engines in your category actually trust — the citation list is the brief for everything that follows.

Week 2 — Give the engines pages worth citing

Your own website is the most-cited source family in local answers, and it's the only one you fully control.

• One service page per real service, each answering a buyer question in the first paragraph — engines quote pages that answer questions directly.

• A locally specific FAQ: pricing ranges, neighborhoods served, hours, parking, insurance, emergency availability. Vague pages don't get cited; concrete ones do.

• Structured business facts (LocalBusiness schema markup): name, address, phone, hours, service area — machine-readable and unambiguous.

Week 3 — Make your Yelp profile hold up

On ChatGPT, Yelp appeared in nine out of ten cited local answers in our benchmark. Work strictly within Yelp's rules: claim the profile, complete every field, add real photos, keep categories and hours accurate, and respond to existing reviews as the owner. Never buy, solicit, or incentivize reviews — engines are summarizing the text of your profile and responses, and a complete, professionally maintained profile reads well even at a modest review count.

Week 4 — Claim the directories your category trusts

Your Week-1 citation list will name two or three directories over and over — Zocdoc if you're a dentist, Houzz if you're a contractor, The Knot if you're a wedding vendor. Claim and correct your listing where the platform allows it; where placement is editorial, that's an outreach email, not a form. Directory work is boring and finite, which is exactly why most competitors haven't done it.

Day 30 — Re-measure with the identical questions

Re-run the same ten questions. Changing the questions invalidates the comparison — the pair of scans is the evidence of what moved. Expect partial movement, not a sweep: engines re-crawl on their own schedule, and some queries take longer to shift.

This loop — scan, publish, claim, re-scan — is what SmartCited runs as a product: the baseline and follow-up scans are automatic, the website content can publish straight to your CMS, and Pro re-measures daily so you see movement the morning it happens. Start with a free scan.