How to show AI

Here’s how those three pillars translate into a real 90-day plan that teams can work on.

Phase 1 (Week 1): Basic Analysis

You can’t improve what the model can’t explain. The first week is a data hygiene sprint, rather than a content sprint.

Start with the local SEO basics that most teams think are already clean:

• Check your NAP information (Name, Address, Phone) across Google Business Profiles, Apple Maps, Yelp, Bing Places, and major data aggregators. Even small inconsistencies – missing suite number, old phone format, new brand that has never been released – train AI engines to treat your product as a low-trust business.
• Check your site pages, about page, and product pages for organized data. Schema is not a magic AI switch — recent research suggests that LLMs are just as readable as any other text on a page. What it does is reduce ambiguity about what your business is and does, and that clarity is what helps the model interpret and cite you correctly.
• Type the questions your customers are actually asking in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview. Unauthorized – real questions like “best dentist near Lincoln Park,” “which EV charger works with the Ford Lightning,” “coffee shops in Berlin that allow dogs.” Be aware of where you appear, where you don’t appear, and what competitors appear instead.

That gap list becomes easier for you over the next 80 days. This is also where many brands find blind spots they didn’t know they had.

Phase 2 (Days 7–30): Content Engineering and Targeted Content

Once you know what instruction you are missing, the task becomes clear. In each blind spot, you create the content that the model wants to say.

A few patterns have taken hold across industries:

• One information, one page. If “best family dentist in Austin with saturday hours” returns three competitors and none of your sites, create or optimize pages that answer that specifically. Don’t bury the answer three volumes down.
• Write a question, not a keyword. AI engines generate complete answers, not phrases. A well-structured FAQ with direct, factual answers often exceeds 2,000 words, a keyword-laden guide that dances around the point
• Speak believably. Include dates, geographic information, actual data, named authors, and descriptive comparisons. Models reward specificity and discount vague claims.

This is the stage where the extract content starts to look different from the old level game design. It’s solid, very authentic, and organized in a way that one can ask the question out loud.

Phase 3 (Days 30–60): Surgical Placement and Off-Page Authorization

An off-page authorization is still important. The economy, however, has changed.

The natural instinct is to chase high-quality publishers. For GEO, that’s often the wrong move.

The sites that search engines tend to pull from are usually not the ones with the highest domain authority. These are the ones that are relevant to your business and are cited most often, even if they are not a major publication.

A more effective way:

• Focus on sites that already rank in Google for instructions that your customers use – the kind of reliable, topical sources you’d want them to find when they’re doing research. Top ranking is not a goal; any authoritative site that serves your audience is important.
• The AI ​​engines of the publishers that you have already mentioned in your category are the models that you trust enough to find. Rerun your Phase 1 information, track which domains keep getting cited, and that’s your short list.
• Size and reputation are not reliable proxies for AI citation rates. A niche publication that has real subject matter authority in your category often gets more AI citations than a big, mainstream name.

The goal is not link volume. It is said, in context, from sources that your class models already trust.

Phase 4 (Days 60–90): Orchestration and Integration

By day 60, you should have new content live, quotes starting to appear on publishers’ sites, and an adequate rating signal. Phase 4 is where GEO stops being a project and starts becoming a program.

Three metrics to track weekly:

• AI quote rate – how often your name is mentioned in AI-generated responses about your valuable information.
• Voice Sharing – your citation rate is relative to your competitors across the same data set.
• Content decay – which citation pages lose citations over time and need to be updated with new data, dates, or information.

The effect of the combination here is profound. Products that treat GEO as a continuum — research, publish, rank, measure, renew — see the highest citations and conversion rates. A recent Search Engine Journal webinar, featuring Uberall with AthenaHQ, says that GEO-savvy brands see 2x more citations and 3–9x higher conversion rates within 90 days compared to brands that still optimize for classic search.

That delta is more important than it looks. As zero-click behavior increases, citations within AI feedback are a turning point.

For a concrete example, Audika France, a multi-location hearing care brand and Uberall customer, ran that orchestration loop as an early adopter. They used it to track how AI engines interpreted their clinics, identify symptom models that weren’t there, and bridge the gap between what was seen and what was recommended. Their results show how one type of multisite has moved from an AI blind spot to a consistent recommendation.

What to Do Next

The pattern is consistent across many industries, including retail and restaurants. Startups are now building a structural advantage that is difficult to release once the stage reaches its peak. Waiters end up explaining to their board a year from now why a competitor has become an automatic recommendation on every model their customers use.

If you want an overview of how your sites are performing in AI search, check out our AI Visibility Grader tool. It gives you a quick overview of your AI visibility and the factors that shape it.

Or if you want to take this a step further and get a more detailed picture of where you stand in AI search, a free GEO Studio trial will show your brand’s presence on all the major search engines.

Local search has changed. This way you become the default answer.

Photo Credits

Featured image: Photo by Michelle Azar/ Uberall. Used with permission.
Image Inside Post: Photo by Uberall. Used with permission.