Resources

Free, current, no email gate.

We publish what we know. The technical fixes are in our scanner; the rest — content, citability, trust, and the slow work of authority — are in the playbook below.

Lead resource v2026.05.2 · 2026-05

The Small-Business SEO + GEO Playbook

What to write, what to fix, and what AI search engines are actually looking for. 8 chapters covering the content side of modern search — content quality, entity clarity, citability, topical authority, trust signals, backlinks, and on-page craft — plus a 90-day plan you can run yourself.

What's inside

  • 01Content quality — depth, originality, freshness
  • 02Entity clarity — being a recognizable business
  • 03Citability — making your content quotable
  • 04Topical authority — the cluster strategy
  • 05Trust signals — looking like real, credible work
  • 06Backlink profile — earning links the durable way
  • 07On-page craft — titles, metas, headings, alt
  • 99Your 90-day plan — week by week
Download PDF (538 KB) No email required. Free to share.

Who the playbook is for.

It is written for the person who owns a small-business site and does the work themselves, or hands it to one developer. It assumes you can edit your own pages and read HTML, and it assumes nothing else. There is no chapter on enterprise tooling, no budget line, and no step that needs a subscription to complete.

If your report card came back a C or a D, the fastest route is the 90-day plan at the end: it sequences the chapters by return, so the fixes that move a grade come before the ones that only tidy. If you scored a B, read chapters 3 and 4 — citability and topical authority are where most otherwise-healthy sites lose ground to AI answer engines.

Why it is free, and stays free.

No email gate, no account, no drip sequence. The playbook covers the work you can do yourself; the paid tiers exist for people who would rather not. Gating it behind a form would only filter out the audience it was written for, and would make the report card's promise — that you can read your own results without an upsell — hard to believe.

It is versioned and dated at the top of this page for a reason. Advice about AI search ages badly: guidance written before answer engines began citing sources reads very differently now. When something in it stops being true, it gets rewritten rather than quietly left up.

What is not in it.

Nothing about buying links, spinning content, or any tactic that works until it is detected. Nothing about keyword density, which has not been a ranking signal for a very long time. And no promises about timelines — a new domain with no inbound links will not rank quickly no matter what it publishes, and any resource that tells you otherwise is selling something.

Found a mistake or have a chapter you wish we'd written? Tell us. We update the playbook every 6 months.

At a glance

The playbook, in numbers.

Chapters8, plus a 90-day plan
Price$0 — no email, no account
RevisedRoughly every 6 months
CoversThe 45% of the grade that is AI search, and the content half of the 55% that is classic SEO
AssumesYou can edit your own pages. Nothing else.
Questions

Common questions.

Do I have to give an email address to download the playbook?

No. The PDF downloads directly with no form, no account and no follow-up sequence. It covers the work you can do yourself; the paid tiers exist for people who would rather not.

How current is the playbook?

The version and date are printed at the top of this page, and it is revised roughly every 6 months. Guidance about AI search ages quickly, so when something in it stops being true it is rewritten rather than quietly left up.

Can I share it with my team or my clients?

Yes. It is free to redistribute as-is. If you found it useful and want to credit it, a link back to this page is welcome but not required.

Read next

The guides.

Everything above in longer form — what the engines actually do, and what to change first.