How to use this checklist
The eight lessons explain why each piece of work matters. This page turns them into an order of operations. Tasks are grouped by month, tagged with the lesson they come from, and given a time estimate and a definition of done, so you can tell whether something is genuinely finished rather than merely started.
The sequence is deliberate. Month one makes the facts about your business agree with each other. Month two makes your pages quotable and machine-readable. Month three strengthens off-site signals and starts measuring. Doing these out of order means fixing the same thing twice. If any of the terminology below is unfamiliar, the AI search glossary defines it in one place.
Before you start anything, run a baseline. Open an assistant logged out, ask the question a customer would ask, and record who gets named. The guide on testing whether ChatGPT recommends your business explains how to do this without fooling yourself. Save the results. In week twelve you will want something to compare against.
Month one: make your facts agree
The goal this month is boring and decisive. Every place an engine can read your business details should say the same thing.
| Task | Lesson | Time | Done when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claim and verify your Google Business Profile | Lesson 2 | 30 min | You hold the account, not a former agency, and the profile shows as verified |
| Complete the high-value profile fields | Lesson 2 | 60 min | Name, address or service area, phone, primary category, hours, website and services are all filled and accurate |
| Choose the right primary category | Lesson 2 | 30 min | Your primary category is the most specific one that covers the majority of your revenue |
| Audit every listing of your business | Lesson 2 | 2-3 hrs | You have a written list of every place your details appear, with mismatches marked |
| Correct the major data aggregators | Lesson 2 | 60 min | Submissions are in with Data Axle, Neustar Localeze and Foursquare, and you have recorded the date |
| Fix the directories that send real traffic | Lesson 2 | 60 min | Every listing you kept on the list now matches your profile exactly |
| Set special hours for the next quarter | Lesson 2 | 15 min | Holiday and seasonal hours are entered at least two weeks ahead |
| Read Lesson 1 properly | Lesson 1 | 20 min | You can explain, in your own words, the difference between ranking and being named |
If you only ever do month one, you will still be better off than most of your competitors. Contradictory facts are the most common reason an assistant hedges or names somebody else.
Month two: make your pages quotable and readable
With the facts settled, the work moves to your website. This month has fewer tasks and more thinking.
| Task | Lesson | Time | Done when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pick your three most commercially important pages | Lesson 3 | 20 min | You have named the three pages you would most want an assistant to quote |
| Rewrite page one to answer questions directly | Lesson 3 | 2 hrs | Each section answers one question in its first sentence, and a lifted paragraph still makes sense alone |
| Add specific, verifiable facts to that page | Lesson 3 | 45 min | Adjectives have been replaced with numbers, names, areas and timeframes wherever possible |
| State service area and pricing honestly | Lesson 3 | 30 min | A reader can tell whether you cover them and roughly what it costs, without contacting you |
| Repeat for pages two and three | Lesson 3 | 3 hrs | All three pages meet the same standard |
| Add LocalBusiness JSON-LD to your site | Lesson 4 | 60 min | A valid block is live, with name, address or areaServed, phone, hours, URL and geo |
| Validate the markup | Lesson 4 | 20 min | Rich Results Test and a schema validator both pass with no errors |
| Add sameAs links to your real profiles | Lesson 4 | 20 min | Every profile you own and maintain is listed, and every URL resolves |
| Check the technical floor | Lesson 5 | 45 min | Pages render server-side or load fast enough to be fetched, your sitemap is current, and internal links reach every page you care about |
| Set crawler permissions deliberately | Lesson 5 | 20 min | robots.txt states your position on GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and OAI-SearchBot on purpose rather than by accident |
The rewrite is the task people skip. It is also the one that most often changes whether you get quoted, because an assistant lifts passages, not pages. If you do nothing else in month two, rewrite one page properly.
Month three: off-site signals and measurement
Now the work moves to what other people say about you, and to telling whether any of this landed.
| Task | Lesson | Time | Done when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Set up a compliant review request routine | Lesson 6 | 45 min | You have a template and a trigger point in your workflow, with no gating and no incentives |
| Reply to every unanswered review | Lesson 6 | 60 min | Every review from the last year has a reply, including the negative ones |
| Identify five relevant places to be mentioned | Lesson 6 | 60 min | You have a shortlist of trade bodies, local press, suppliers or community sites where a mention would be genuine |
| Pursue two of them | Lesson 6 | 2 hrs | Two outreach attempts are made, whatever the outcome |
| Build your prompt test set | Lesson 7 | 30 min | Five to ten real customer questions are written down and saved |
| Run the test across three engines | Lesson 7 | 30 min | Results for ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews are recorded with the date |
| Compare against your week-one baseline | Lesson 7 | 20 min | You can say what changed, what did not, and what you will do about it |
| Set up a monthly scorecard | Lesson 7 | 30 min | A single page or sheet exists with the handful of numbers you will track each month |
| Decide what comes next | Lesson 8 | 30 min | You know whether to keep going alone, hire help, or stop at foundation level |
If you fall behind
Falling behind is normal. Running a business interrupts everything. Two rules keep the plan useful.
First, never skip forward past an unfinished month-one task. A contradiction in your listings will undermine the work in months two and three, and you will end up redoing it.
Second, if a task keeps being postponed, shrink it. Auditing every listing in one afternoon is daunting. Auditing five listings a week for a month is not, and produces the same result.
When the 90 days are up
Maintenance is lighter than setup, but it is not zero. Hours change, a number gets ported, a new directory picks up an old record, an engine changes how it presents citations. The guide on what to do after the 90-day checklist sets out the recurring monthly and quarterly tasks and roughly how long each takes.
When the foundation is genuinely stable and growth now depends on scale or displacing a stronger competitor, read Lesson 8. It is honest about where this course stops and what the next level involves, including the disclosed referral to AI SEO Rainmakers for readers who have outgrown the basics.
Printing and sharing it
This page is deliberately plain so it can be printed or copied into whatever you already use.
To work from paper, print it and tick tasks as you go. To work from a spreadsheet, copy each month’s table into a sheet and add two columns: date completed, and who did it. To delegate, hand over the sheet plus your canonical record document, since the definition of done for each task is written so somebody else can complete it and you can verify the result without redoing the work.
One rule if you delegate: the canonical record, your exact business name, address or service areas, phone number and hours, stays under your control. Everything else can be handed over.