AI search optimization, one month at a time

Week 1: Find Out Where You Stand

Write your ten most valuable buyer questions. Not "what is business software" but the questions that come minutes before a decision: what it costs for a company your size, how it compares to the tool they already pay for, how long it takes to switch. Ask all ten in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity without naming your brand, and log who gets named instead of you.

In the same week, confirm assistants can read you at all: your page text present in the raw response, AI crawlers allowed by name, a current sitemap. That is the floor, and it is where most sites fail before content ever becomes the issue.

Week 2: Fix Your Identity, Then Your Best Five Pages

First make sure the plainest description of what you do sits on your main pages and in your business identity markup: legal name, founding date, founder, what you sell, where you operate. Assistants describe you using whatever is clearest, so leaving that vague means being described by an old article or a testimonial.

Then take the five pages that matter commercially and rewrite the opening of each so the answer arrives in the first 60 words. Replace every generic claim with something checkable: a figure, a date, a named tool, a real timeframe. Turn any comparison into an actual table.

Weeks 3 and 4: Build the Cluster, Not the Page

A buyer question never arrives alone. Someone asking how to be cited also asks how to check it, what changed versus Google, and what is blocking them technically. Build a small set of pages that answer each adjacent question completely and link them to each other. Assistants that find one good answer on your site keep returning for the next one, so a cluster earns far more citations than the same words in one long page.

What to Measure, and What to Ignore

Measure three things. Whether you are named on your ten questions, tracked monthly in writing. Assistant referral visits, kept separate from search traffic, with conversion attached. And impressions against clicks on your key pages, because falling clicks on steady impressions is the signature of an assistant answering in your place.

Ignore raw pageview totals as a measure of AI visibility. Assistant traffic is deliberately low volume and high intent. Judging it by volume will lead you to abandon the channel that produces your best-qualified enquiries.

What Not to Do

Do not mass-produce thin pages. Unsigned filler has nothing verifiable behind it, so there is no reason for a model to prefer it. Do not chase every assistant separately; the same structural work serves all of them. And do not expect fast feedback, because models refresh their view of your site weeks after you change it.

One month of honest measurement, five rewritten pages, and one real cluster will move you further than a year of publishing.