If you're the entire marketing department, you probably know the Tuesday I mean, because every solo marketer I talk to seems to live the same one. The founder sends you a LinkedIn post saying nobody googles anymore. One newsletter calls llms.txt mandatory, and the next one calls it dead. A podcast guest insists brand mentions beat backlinks. Meanwhile the actual work, with an actual target on it, is yours alone.
This post is a starter kit for you, sized for maybe four hours a week: the few things that move the needle, plus a list of things you have my permission to ignore.
Shrink the job first
The fire-hose makes this look enormous. At solo scale, though, AI search visibility is a small job you do consistently. When a buyer asks an engine a question, the answer cites a handful of sources, and you want one of your pages, or a page that talks about you, among them for the questions that come right before a deal. Any tactic or tool that doesn't help put you in that handful is commentary, however smart it sounds.
Over on r/AskMarketing, the solo marketers venting have the opposite problem. They're juggling seventeen priorities and six social accounts, and they feel behind on every one. One recent thread there was titled, word for word, "Could Use Advice (And Just Need to Vent)," and the top replies all came back to the same suggestion, which was to do fewer things. I'd take that advice literally.
Solo Marketer: Could Use Advice (And Just Need to Vent)
I've been working at a B2B tech company of about 300 employees as a solo marketer for almost a year now. The job has been completely stressful for a number of reasons, but I'm feeling the weight of this job bleeding into my personal life an...
The five-query start
Before you write anything, pick five queries, the ones a buyer types while actually comparing tools like yours. The useful ones carry constraints: a buyer asking for a tool that fits their team size or their stack, or one worried about compliance or an upcoming migration. Keep the list where you'll trip over it weekly, because those five questions are what you'll measure yourself against from here on.
Next, type each one into ChatGPT and Perplexity and actually read the answers. Give it twenty minutes. By the end you'll know who gets cited on your money questions and whether you appear anywhere, and you'll have spotted where the answers are thin, which is more competitive intelligence than most decks contain.
From weeks of watching small brands' citation data, one pattern stands out that I haven't seen written up anywhere. Small accounts almost never break through on the big category query first. Their first win comes on some weirdly specific question. A generic "best X software" prompt keeps citing the same five incumbents forever, but the version with real constraints in it has no good page anywhere, so whoever publishes a clean one first tends to get cited fast and stay cited.
Specificity is the solo marketer's advantage, because big incumbents can't write a page for every niche way of asking, and you only need to own five.
200+ SaaS teams already track their AI citations.
They know exactly when ChatGPT mentions their brand, and when it stops. Do you?
The four-hour week
With the queries set, showing up weekly matters more than any tactic, so here's how I'd split roughly four hours.
Two of the hours go into writing, one answer-shaped page at a time. Give each buying question its own page, put the real answer in the first lines, and write the headings in the words a buyer would use, with concrete numbers and steps filling the body. I'd take one deep page every week or two over four thin ones every week, every time, and the structural rules don't change with team size.
Another hour goes to what I think of as the corroboration drip. Engines lean toward brands other sites vouch for, so you feed them that in small weekly doses. In practice that means one sentence describing your product, used word for word everywhere, and fresh profiles on the two or three review sites your buyers check. Add a community answer where the product is a real fit, and one listicle pitch a month. None of it is glamorous, but the mentions-versus-backlinks evidence puts these placements at the top for authority work right now, and they cost less than anything else on the list.
The final hour is measurement. Rerun the five queries, write down who got cited, and mark anything that moved; at the start, doing this monthly is enough. People skip this hour more than any other, and it's exactly the hour that would have told them a quarter's worth of work wasn't landing.
One correction to my own math: four hours describes a good week. Plenty of weeks the page will swallow all four, and that's allowed, since the schedule can flex as long as the five queries never change. Keep checking against the same questions and the system survives your busiest months; teams that manage that are mostly the ones whose work compounds, while everyone else restarts every quarter.
The skip list
In most solo marketers' weeks, half of those four hours drains away into work nobody needed. Here's what I'd stop doing.
Start by tuning out the llms.txt arguments. There's still no proof the engines use the file, and no measured citation outcome has ever turned on it. Tuning pages for one engine goes next. The engines rebuild themselves several times a year, so anything you tune for one model's current behavior goes stale with its next rebuild.
Daily citation checks can go too. The cited sources shuffle so much from one week to the next that checking every day just records noise and makes you nervous. The last thing to ignore is nearly every new-tool launch. What you're short of is hours, so the only tool worth adding is one that gives you some back.
Someone on r/AISmartMarketing asked outright whether anybody has really moved the needle on AI search visibility, or whether it's all guesswork. The answers divide along the same line as this list. Those reporting movement do dull fundamentals against a fixed set of queries, and those still guessing are doing everything else.
Has anyone actually moved the needle on ‘AI search visibility’ yet, or are we all guessing?
Everyone’s selling AEO / GEO / “get cited by ChatGPT” right now. I’ve been testing it on a couple of accounts - structured content, FAQ schema, conversational long-tail phrasing. Early read: it’s real but slow, and attribution is a nightmar...
How often does ChatGPT mention your brand?
Most founders have no idea. The answer might surprise you.
Your first month, mapped
Here's the first month the way I'd run it, since "just start" advice never says how.
Week one is research only, and you ship nothing. You write the five queries, try them in two engines, and save screenshots of the answers in a single doc. Then give ten minutes to an entity check by reading your homepage, your about page and your main directory listing side by side. If they don't describe the product in the same sentence, or a stranger reading all three might put you in different categories, fix the worst mismatch and leave the rest.
The first page gets written in week two. Point it at the query whose current answer looked thinnest, since that's the easiest citation to take, and an early win shows you how the whole loop behaves and lifts morale.
Corroboration fills week three. Search your category, find the two review sites that come up, and claim or update your profiles there. Then write one proper community answer, meaning a long one, and leave your link out unless the thread truly asks for it. Each of these puts a description of your product somewhere the engines keep rereading.
In week four you publish page two and do your first proper check-in, running the five queries again and comparing the results with the week-one screenshots. Write four sentences about what moved and what you'll change. That note is your strategy document now, and four sentences is plenty for a team of one.
The founder conversation
Most guides skip the part that matters more for a solo marketer than any tactic, which is managing expectations upward. Your founder scrolls the same feed you do, and at some point you'll be asked why the company isn't "ranked in ChatGPT" yet.
My answer comes in two parts. The first is timing. New pages and mentions can change what engines retrieve within weeks, while the deeper "the model just knows us" effect builds over quarters. So month one gets you data and month three gets you movement, and quarter three is when you start getting defensibility.
The second part is the number you'll report: citation presence on the five fixed buying queries, once a month, with dates and screenshots. Say plainly that the founder's own chat sessions don't count, because personalized answers are anecdotes. Whoever sets the scoreboard sets the terms of every later conversation about this, and a fixed list of queries costs next to nothing to keep.
Founders still deciding whether to hire that one-person team can start with our guide to what SaaS founders should invest in before hiring a marketing team, which covers what to hand over on day one.
When to graduate from the spreadsheet
For the first month, your entire measurement setup is a spreadsheet plus one hour a month, and I mean that as advice rather than a compromise. Doing the five queries by hand shows you things a dashboard would smooth over. You see how the answers are worded and which competitor's page keeps coming out on top, and you learn what the engines believe your category even is.
Two signals tell you it's time to move on. One is that you've started skipping the manual check, which on a one-person team usually happens in month two. The other is that you're making real decisions from this data and a monthly impression can't carry them. You need weekly per-engine history then, because only at weekly resolution can you link "I shipped the page on the 12th" with "the citation appeared on the 26th." When either happens, automated tracking across engines stops being a luxury, since it hands back the hour the manual check was eating.
Expect your first check-in to look strange. The answers change every time you run them, because engines rotate their sources between checks even when your market hasn't moved at all. That's why the queries stay fixed and every run gets a date in the log: what you're after is the trend underneath the noise, and no single week's snapshot will ever look fair.
That's the whole starter kit, and none of it is glamorous. It fits into a week that already holds webinar slides and a newsletter, and it compounds. If you only do one thing this week, write the five queries down.
15 hours a week manually. Or 15 minutes with RankControl.
Track citations, monitor competitors, and fix content gaps across every AI search engine. Automatically.
