Sequence matters more than effort
AIEO fails most often through order rather than volume: teams publish before fixing contradictions, and chase mentions before their own site says anything specific. The fast, cheap work first is what makes the slow work pay.
Month 1: baseline and contradictions
Fix your canonical description, resolve conflicting claims, correct stale facts, and set the fixed prompt set you will measure against for the year. That is the audit plus a baseline you can’t retrofit.
Months 2–3: state what you refuse to state
Pricing ranges, timelines, and who you are wrong for. This is the highest-return content work available, needs no authority, and puts you into every prompt about cost.
Spend the first quarter deciding what your business will say plainly. Everything after depends on it.
Months 3–5: restructure the pages that matter
Question-shaped headings, answer-first paragraphs, self-contained passages on your service and decision-stage pages — additive work that keeps the writing while making it retrievable.
Months 4–9: answer the real questions, and prune
Work the ranked queue of genuine buyer questions, one at a time, and remove or merge the thin pages diluting them. Growth and pruning are the same activity.
Months 3–12: corroboration, continuously
Profiles, listings, partner pages, being written about, reviews. Start early because it is slow, and it is what eventually decides recommendation rather than mere inclusion.
Every month: review, report, adjust
Same prompts, sampled repeatedly, reported as appearance and description with a ranked backlog — the report that generates work. And once a quarter, check every stated fact is still true.