- Owner
- Project lead with the owner
- Cadence
- Weekly 30-minute check
- Time box
- 13 weeks
- Output
- Dated board with evidence links
What the board does
The 90-day board turns the playbook's stages into dates. It is a single page, printed or shared, with a row per week and four columns: the procedure due, the person doing it, the evidence it leaves and whether it closed. The board is short on purpose. If a week needs more than three procedures, the plan is too wide, and the slice of services and cities should shrink.
Ninety days fits the published timeline. Listing and data fixes can surface in AI answers within a few weeks. Content takes two to four months, and the same is true of reviews and outside mentions. A quarter is long enough to see the first group of changes in answers and to have the second group under way.
The board
| Weeks | Procedures due | Evidence left behind | Checkpoint question |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fact sheet, prompt panel | Approved fact sheet; frozen panel with date | Would two staff members give the same answer to every field? |
| 2 | AI visibility audit | Capture sheet for every panel question on every platform | Do we know who gets named today and which sources are cited? |
| 3–4 | Google, Bing, Apple Maps, Yelp and the niche directories | Field match sheets and a change log | Does every listing match the fact sheet? |
| 5–6 | Service pages and FAQs | Published URLs and the passage test for each | Can each panel question be answered by quoting one paragraph? |
| 7 | Structured data and crawler access | Validator results and a robots.txt copy | Can AI crawlers fetch the pages, and does the markup match them? |
| 8 | Neighborhood pages and fan-out coverage | Fan-out map with every gap assigned | Which sub-question still has no page? |
| 5 and 9 | Monthly re-test | Second and third capture sheets | What changed against week 2? |
| 9–12 | Review language and local press | Request log; outreach target list | Are new reviews describing the service by name? |
| 13 | Quarter report | Report with before-and-after answers | Which slice comes next? |
Running the weekly check
The weekly meeting reads the board, nothing else. For each row due that week, the owner of the row says whether it closed and points to the evidence. A row closes only when the evidence exists in the shared folder: a screenshot, an export, a published URL or a signed fact sheet. Talking about the work does not close it.
When a row slips, the board records the new date and the reason in one line. Two kinds of slip are common. Access slips happen when nobody has the Google or Bing login; the fix is to recover ownership through the platform's own process and move the listing row back one week. Approval slips happen when a page waits on the owner; the fix is a fixed review window, such as two business days, after which the project lead publishes the approved draft.
What to protect during the quarter
Two things must not change once week one closes. The first is the prompt panel. If a question is reworded in week six, the week-two answers no longer compare with anything. New questions go on a waiting list and join the panel at the start of the next quarter. The second is the re-test method: the same platforms, the same kind of session and the same location setting each month. The re-test SOP spells those settings out.
Everything else is allowed to move. Pages can be rewritten, listings corrected again and review requests adjusted. The point of fixing the panel is that those changes become visible against a steady instrument.
Quarter sign-off
After the quarter
The second quarter repeats the board for the next slice, with a shorter listings block because the fact sheet and profiles already exist. Many businesses expand city by city: a Walnut Creek practice might add Concord and then San Ramon, reusing the service pages and adding neighborhood passages for each. Bay Area AEO re-tests prompts monthly so progress stays visible; the board makes sure the work between re-tests is dated and filed.
An example slice
Consider a family dental practice in Concord that wants more Invisalign and emergency patients. The week-one panel uses the shape of Bay Area AEO's published demo questions, such as a pediatric-friendly family dentist in Concord and an emergency dentist open Saturday, adjusted to the practice's own services. Weeks three and four bring Google, Bing, Apple Maps and Yelp into line, then Healthgrades and Zocdoc, the directories the agency's dentist page names. Weeks five and six produce an Invisalign page and an emergency visit page, each opening with the answer a patient wants: what happens, how long it takes, what it typically costs and which plans the practice accepts. By week thirteen the report can set the week-two answers beside the current ones for every question on the panel.
What the quarter asks of the owner
The owner's part is small but fixed: about an hour in week one to sign the fact sheet and agree the panel, a review window for each page draft in weeks five to eight, and thirty minutes in week thirteen to read the report and pick the next slice. Put those dates on the owner's calendar on day one.