China GEO Roadmap: The 30-60-90 Day Implementation Plan

Every China GEO engagement we run follows the same underlying arc: days 1–30 establish the truth, days 31–60 build the foundation, days 61–90 earn the citations. Here is that roadmap in full — what happens in each phase, what it costs in effort, and what “working” looks like at each gate.

Days 1–30: Baseline & truth

The first month is about knowing — not doing content, not “campaigns.”

Week 1 — Prompt design. Build the prompt set: 30–60 natural simplified-Chinese questions covering your category’s discovery moments — the open questions buyers ask before they name any brand (“哪家…比较好” / ”…怎么选”) plus the comparison questions (“X 和 Y 哪个好”). The set gets frozen: you’ll re-run it monthly, unchanged, forever.

Weeks 2–3 — Baseline runs. Execute across all five engines. Capture every answer: who appears, in what position, with what description, citing which sources. Also capture the “source map”: the domains engines cite for your category, ranked by frequency.

Week 4 — Findings & roadmap. Convert evidence into a prioritized plan. The output you should insist on:

• Current-state report: your answer presence rate, competitor share, citation gaps
• Source map: which Chinese platforms actually shape your category’s answers
• 90-day roadmap: sequenced, with owners and KPIs

Day-30 gate: you know, with evidence, where you stand and what the plan is. KPI baseline recorded.

Days 31–60: Foundation building

Month two builds what engines need to know you exist: entity scaffolding and first citable content.

Entity track (parallel, weeks 4–6):

• Canonical Chinese brand name locked; retrofitted across all owned properties
• Baidu Baike entry created or rebuilt to current, rich standards
• Structured facts page live on your Chinese site: founding, positioning, credentials, clients, awards — extractable, consistent
• Key English pages replaced with true Chinese-language versions (not machine translation)

Content track (weeks 4–8):

• 10–15 pieces of question-shaped Chinese content on retrievable platforms: comparison pages, category explainers, FAQ blocks, technical deep-dives
• Zhihu presence initiated on the category’s top questions
• WeChat official account publishing begins (if not active) — it’s your Yuanbao citation asset

Corroboration track (starts week 5–6):

• Pitches out to Chinese trade media in your vertical
• Any existing stale coverage identified for updating

Day-60 gate: entity coverage complete; first content live and Baidu-indexable; corroboration pipeline started. Early indicators: some new citations may already appear in re-run answers.

Days 61–90: Corroboration & first compounding

Month three is about independent voices — the layer engines weight most.

• Third-party coverage publishes (media articles, expert mentions, contributed pieces)
• Zhihu answer set matured: your category’s key questions each have a quality, informative answer touching your brand
• Baike-adjacent platforms (Zhuge Wang, vertical directories) completed
• Second baseline re-run at day 90: full diff against day 30

Day-90 gate — what “working” looks like:

Metric	Day 30	Day 90 target
Entity coverage (Baike etc.)	Baseline	100% complete, current
Citable Chinese content	Baseline	15–30 pieces live
Independent corroboration	Baseline	First wave published
Answer citations of your sources	Baseline	+N (any real increase = working)
Answer presence rate	Baseline	Flat to first gains
Recommendation rate	Baseline	Early gains in niche prompts

Set expectations honestly: answer presence at 90 days is usually “first gains,” not “dominance.” Strong compounding shows months 4–6, as citation density and corroboration accumulate. Anyone promising 90-day dominance is selling you something.

Beyond 90: the monitoring loop

From month four, the program becomes a loop:

1. Monthly: re-run frozen prompt set → diff answers → citation tracking
2. Content calendar driven by gaps: whatever the prompt set shows missing is next month’s content
3. Quarterly: roadmap refresh, competitor deep-dive, engine-landscape review (Chinese AI market share shifts fast — the engine priorities of month 12 may not be month 3’s)
4. Alerts: competitor movement in your answers triggers response

This loop is where the moat gets built. Every cycle makes your entity more established, your citations denser, and your displacement more expensive.

Common failure modes (avoid these)

1. Skipping the baseline. Without a frozen prompt set, you can’t prove what moved — and the program dies at the first budget review.
2. Content without entity. Publishing articles while your Baike entry is a stub. Engines can’t recommend an entity they can’t resolve.
3. Translation instead of localization. Machine-translated English content is filtered out and signals low commitment. It’s Chinese-language or nothing.
4. Self-assertion without corroboration. 30 pages of your own claims lose to 5 independent mentions.
5. Stopping at 90 days. The competitor who starts month 3 has to beat the competitor who started month 1 at their month 12 — with a 9-month compounding gap.

The takeaway

China GEO is not a hack, a tool purchase, or a one-off project. It’s a 90-day discipline followed by a monthly loop, built on evidence at every step. The brands winning Chinese AI answers right now are simply the ones that started the loop — while their competitors were still debating whether GEO is real.

Ready to see your baseline? That’s always step one.

→ Get your GEO audit