Your 90-day AEO plan

An AEO program is a rhythm, not a project. In the first week, set up the measuring stick: engines, prompt panel and baseline scorecard. In the first 30 days, fix what is broken: access, rendering and wrong facts. By day 60, improve the pages that answer your weakest prompts and start the evidence work. By day 90, report the trend, decide what worked and plan the next quarter.

The first week

1. Choose the engines to track, from what your buyers use (lesson 3).
2. Build and freeze the prompt panel (lesson 4).
3. Run the baseline and score it on the four MRCA stages (lesson 5).
4. Check crawler access, CDN settings and your source-of-truth record (lessons 7 and 9).
5. Name an owner for each part of the plan and a date for the first monthly report.

The 30, 60, 90-day rhythm

When an answer about you is wrong

Wrong or outdated answers will happen. Treat them as incidents with a simple routine. First, record the answer with its engine, locale, date and sources. Second, find the source of the error: your own page, a profile, a third-party article, or no visible source at all. Third, correct what you control and ask publishers to correct what you do not. Fourth, make the right fact easy to find in text on your own site, with a date. Fifth, re-check the prompt in later cycles rather than the next day, because answers change on their own schedule.

When to re-baseline

A baseline is useful only while the conditions behind it hold. Re-baseline, meaning run the full panel fresh and start a new comparison, when you add or retire many prompts, when you launch a major product or enter a new market, when you start tracking a new engine, or when an engine changes its product in a way that clearly changes its answers. Keep the old history; just stop comparing new results with it directly.

Worked example: Northwind Dental's quarter

Northwind's first week produces a panel of twenty-two prompts on two engines and a baseline: mentioned in most answers, rarely recommended, never cited, hours wrong. In the first month it fixes the hours everywhere, puts them in text on the site and opens its CDN to the search crawlers. In the second month it rewrites the children's dentistry page answer-first and starts asking every patient for a review. In the third month its report shows the Accurate stage fixed, citations of the new page in one engine, and recommendations not yet moving. The next quarter's plan focuses on reviews and the second location's page.

After day 90

The second quarter looks like the first, with less setup. Keep the panel and the monthly report running, review the pages and profiles on their schedule, and pick the next weakest stage to work on. Add prompts only for new products or markets. Once a year, check that the engines you track are still the ones your buyers use, and adjust the list before you re-baseline.

Your plan

Every practice task in this course added a section to your AEO plan. The worksheet brings them together: engines, baseline, site fixes, off-site evidence and the program itself, with a summary on top. Finish the summary, share it with the people named as owners, and put the first monthly report in the calendar.