The owner's homework

Six setup jobs nobody can do for you

AI engines answer from what they can read: directories, review sites, forums, steady specific posts. None of that requires an audience, but some of it requires the account holder, and that is you. Here is every job, walked through. Do them once, keep them alive, and you have given the engines something to cite.

Not sure which of these matter most for your business? The free scanshows which engines already know you, and the $149 report shows the sources each engine cited for your category, so you spend effort where it counts.

Job 01 · the biggest one

Claim your Google Business Profile

Engines lean on business listings to confirm you exist, where you are, and what you do. An unclaimed or stale profile is a missing citation for every question about your area.

  1. Go to google.com/business and sign in with the Google account you want to own the listing.
  2. Search your business name. If a profile already exists, choose it and click claim; if not, create it.
  3. Verify ownership when asked. Google offers a phone call, email, video, or a postcard depending on category and country. The postcard can take up to two weeks, longer in some countries; do not stall the rest of the list while you wait.
  4. Fill everything in: exact hours, services, service area, phone, website. Blank fields are unreadable fields.
  5. Add real photos: the shopfront, the van, the work. Skip stock images.
  6. Put the profile somewhere you will see it monthly, and update it when anything changes.

About 30 minutes, plus verification wait

Job 02

Be present where your category gets reviewed

Buyers rank a review-site citation as the single most trust-building part of an AI answer (G2, 2026). Every category has two or three platforms the engines keep citing; being absent there is being absent from the answer.

  1. Find where your category gets reviewed: search a question a customer would ask and note which review platforms keep appearing for businesses like yours.
  2. Claim your listing on each one. Most have a free "is this your business" flow.
  3. Make name, address, phone and website identical everywhere, character for character. Mismatches read as different businesses.
  4. Add your services and a plain description written the way a customer talks, not industry jargon.

About an hour, once

Job 03

Open an X account and post steadily

Grok draws its answers from activity on X. A business account that posts steadily is raw material with your name on it. Follower count is not the point: what an answer quotes is content, and a small account posting real work is quotable.

  1. Create an account in your business's name, with your location in the bio and a link to your site.
  2. Post something real and specific: a job you finished, a question a customer asked, a thing people get wrong about your work.
  3. Aim for steady, not viral. A few real posts a week beats a burst and a silence.
  4. If the blank page is the obstacle, that is exactly what the Ghostwriter exists for: daily drafts in your voice, you post by hand.

15 minutes to set up, 3 minutes a day after

Job 04

Show up in communities the honest way

Reddit and niche forums are among the most cited sources in AI answers. They are also where marketing goes to die: communities remove pitches and ban accounts fast. The only currency there is being genuinely useful.

  1. Find the communities where your customers already ask questions about your category.
  2. Read each community's rules before posting anything. Take them literally.
  3. Answer questions as a practitioner sharing what they know: specifics, real numbers, no links, no pitch.
  4. Name your business only when the story requires it, and disclose plainly that it is yours.
Never post promotional content to Reddit. It gets removed, the account gets banned, and the community remembers the business name for the wrong reason.

30 minutes a week, ongoing

Job 05

Build an honest review habit

A steady flow of real reviews, with the owner replying to each one, is one of the most readable trails a business can leave. Replies are public content too: engines can read how you treat people.

  1. Get your direct review link: in your Google Business Profile, use the "Ask for reviews" button (under "Get more reviews") to copy a link straight to the review box. Keep it where you can paste it in seconds.
  2. Ask every customer for a Google review at the natural moment, usually right when the work is done and they are happy it is done. A plain sentence beats a campaign: "If you have a minute, a review genuinely helps a small business like ours."
  3. Ask everyone, not just the delighted. Filtering who gets asked violates Google's rules, and a profile of nothing but perfect scores reads as exactly what it is. One caution: a few platforms forbid asking for reviews at all, so check each platform's own rules before sending your link anywhere but Google.
  4. Never pay, trade discounts, or offer prizes for reviews. That is against the rules on every platform and, in many places, the law.
  5. Reply to every review within a few days. Thank the good ones specifically. Answer the bad ones calmly, with what you did about it. The reply is for the next hundred readers, not the one reviewer.

If you have the Ghostwriter, its review desk does the drafting side of this job: the ask messages and your public replies, written in your voice, plus the QR code for your review link.

5 minutes per job, forever, and worth it

Job 06

Make it possible to book you

An assistant that likes the look of you can do one of two things: hand the customer a way to book, or describe you and move on to a business that has one. The difference is whether there is a single booking address it can find. This job is about having one, and saying so in the two places that get read.

  1. Pick one booking address and stick to it. Whatever you already use is fine: a scheduling tool, a booking page on your site, even a plain quote-request form. What matters is that it is one URL, it works on a phone, and it does not make anyone phone you to get started.
  2. Put it in your Google Business Profile. Edit your profile, find the booking or appointment link field, and paste the same URL. This is the field assistants and Google surfaces read when someone asks to book, and it is empty on most small-business profiles.
  3. Link it from your homepage with words that say what it is. "Book an appointment" or "Request a quote" is readable by a person and a machine. "Get started" is readable by neither.
  4. Declare it in your site's structured data as a booking action, so an assistant can see the address rather than guess at a button. This is the technical half, and it is the one part of this list you may want handing over. The $149 report checks your site for it by name, along with the rest of the machine layer.
  5. Keep the three in agreement. If the booking link changes, change it in your profile and your site the same afternoon. An assistant that sends a customer to a dead booking page costs you the job and the trust.

Worth knowing: this is one of the newer levers, and it is moving. Assistants are getting better at completing tasks rather than just answering questions, and the businesses they can complete a booking with are the ones that published an address to book at.

About an hour, plus the structured data

Or hand the list to us

Everything above is genuinely doable yourself; that is why the page is free. It is also real, ongoing work. Our monthly plans do the fixable parts for you, measure the result with the same scan every month, and tell you honestly what moved.

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