What Is the Action Plan?
After running an audit and generating recommendations, Cited organizes everything into an Action Plan — a ranked list of specific steps to improve your AI visibility. Each action is prioritized based on its expected impact and the effort required to complete it.
You'll find your Action Plan at /app/workflow. Think of it as your GEO roadmap: a clear sequence of tasks that moves your scores upward with each item you complete.
How Actions Are Prioritized
Every action in your plan has two key attributes:
Impact — How much this action is expected to improve your AI visibility. High-impact actions address gaps that directly affect whether AI models cite your content.
Effort — How long the action will take to implement:
| Effort Level | Time Estimate | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Easy | Under 1 hour | Adding meta descriptions, fixing a robots.txt rule, adding basic schema markup to a key page |
| Medium | 1-4 hours | Rewriting a landing page for AI clarity, implementing FAQ schema across your site, creating an llms.txt file |
| Hard | 4+ hours | Building a comprehensive resource hub, restructuring site architecture, developing a new content series targeting AI-cited topics |
Actions are ranked with the best ratio of impact to effort at the top. This means the first items on your list are always the most efficient use of your time.
Start With Quick Wins
When you open your Action Plan for the first time, focus on the Easy actions at the top of the list. These are your quick wins — changes that take less than an hour but can meaningfully improve your visibility.
Common quick wins include:
- Adding or fixing schema markup on your highest-traffic pages. Structured data helps AI models understand and cite your content with confidence.
- Updating robots.txt to ensure AI crawlers can access your content. A single restrictive rule can block your entire site from AI indexing.
- Improving page structure with clear headings, summary paragraphs, and definitive statements that AI models can easily extract and quote.
- Adding author bios and publication dates to build the trust signals that AI models weigh when choosing sources to cite.
Completing a few quick wins often produces a noticeable improvement in your next audit. They also build momentum — you see results fast, which makes the larger items feel more approachable.
Generating Solutions
For any action in your plan, click Generate Solution to get implementation-ready output. Cited doesn't just tell you what to do — it produces the actual artifacts you need.
Depending on the action, a generated solution might include:
- Rewritten content optimized for AI comprehension and citability
- JSON-LD schema markup ready to paste into your page templates
- Specific code snippets for technical fixes
- Content outlines for new pages or resources you should create
Solutions are generated based on your actual website content and audit results, not generic templates. This means the output is tailored to your site and ready to use with minimal editing.
Working Through Your Plan
A practical approach to your Action Plan:
- Complete all Easy actions first. These typically take a single focused session and deliver immediate returns.
- Schedule Medium actions into your regular workflow. One or two per week keeps steady progress without overwhelming your team.
- Plan Hard actions as projects. These are larger initiatives — assign them to sprint cycles or dedicated project time.
- Re-audit after completing a batch. Run a new audit every 2-4 weeks to measure the impact of your changes and refresh your recommendations.
Your Action Plan updates as you complete items and run new audits. New recommendations may appear as Cited identifies additional opportunities based on your improved baseline.
Marking Actions Complete
When you click Mark Complete on a recommendation-sourced action, Cited automatically runs the underlying validation check against your live site to verify the change shipped. You'll see one of three badges on the action card:
- Green ✓ — verified live on your site. You're done.
- Amber ⚠ — the change isn't visible yet (CDN cache, redirect chain, or it didn't ship). Click Re-validate to retry, or view the action for a hint about what we couldn't see.
- Grey ? — the check couldn't run this time (cache issue, site down, or the check doesn't apply). Click Re-validate to force a fresh fetch.
Actions that don't have a deterministic check behind them (most content-strategy actions) just change status — no badge appears.
Using Claude Desktop with MCP
If you use Claude Desktop, you can connect it to Cited through MCP (Model Context Protocol) for a conversational way to work with your Action Plan.
Once connected, you can ask Claude questions like:
- "What should I work on next for my AI visibility?"
- "What are my highest-impact quick wins?"
- "Generate a solution for my top recommendation"
- "How has my AI visibility changed since last month?"
This gives you a natural-language interface to your Cited data — useful for quick check-ins, team stand-ups, or when you want to explore your options before diving into the full dashboard.
To set up MCP with Claude Desktop, visit your account settings in Cited and follow the connection instructions.
Next Steps
Your Action Plan is a living document. As you implement changes and run new audits, it evolves to reflect your current state and new opportunities. The key is consistency: regular audits, steady implementation, and tracking your progress over time.
Start now by opening your Action Plan and knocking out your first quick win.