Your monthly delivery cycle — what to expect

## The 30-day rhythm

When you start a paid plan, Rankply locks in a monthly delivery anniversary. Every cycle our team produces a fixed bundle of publications matched to your subscription tier. The cadence is intentional: AI engines reward consistent recent activity more than they reward sporadic bursts. A brand publishing weekly outperforms an identical brand publishing the same total annual volume in two quarterly waves, every time.

## Week 1 — discovery and planning

- Fresh audit run — same four checks as your initial free audit, plus the premium platform scan if you're on Plus or Pro. - Editorial team reads your brief and picks topic angles for the month, optimised against your current citation-source gaps. - You get a Slack-style notification in your dashboard when each piece enters the calendar. - Brief misalignments are flagged early — the team won't ship content that contradicts your stated positioning. - A 30-minute monthly strategy call is available on Plus and Pro tiers; we use it to debrief the previous cycle and align on this one. On Standard, the same context happens asynchronously in the dashboard comments.

## Weeks 2-4 — production and shipping

- Pieces ship on the schedule shown in your `/dashboard/calendar`. - Each goes through draft → your approval → publication. Default approval window is 48 hours, after which we auto-publish unless flagged. - All content is tagged in the platform so you can see which AI engines cite it in subsequent audits. - Mid-month, we trigger a lightweight refresh-audit so the citation-source leaderboard reflects your latest content footprint. - Distribution work happens in parallel: cross-posting to LinkedIn, formatting for newsletter, lining up internal links from your existing content. Distribution is included; it's not an add-on.

## What's in the bundle (and what isn't)

A monthly cycle on Standard typically includes:

- **2 long-form articles** (1,500-2,500 words each) optimised for tracked prompts in your audit - **4 LinkedIn long-form posts** in your founder's voice - **2 schema upgrades or page rewrites** on existing high-leverage pages - **1 outbound-pitch round** to category aggregators or vertical communities

Plus and Pro tiers scale these counts and add PR outreach, podcast booking, and reference-graph submissions. The composition is deliberate — half of every cycle is owned content (you control it, AI cites it as supporting context), half is off-domain placement work (third parties cite it, AI weights it heavily).

What's NOT included: paid advertising, design retainers, video production, brand strategy work. These are outside the GEO charter; if you need them we'll point you at trusted partners but we don't bundle them.

## Pause or scale anytime

You can swap plan tiers between cycles. The calendar updates automatically and unused credits roll into the next month for up to 60 days. Cancellation is on rolling 30 days; we don't lock customers into annual contracts unless they explicitly opt in for the annual discount (which is 15% off and worth it if you're committed for a year).

## What you can expect to measure

Most customers see meaningful citation-source movement by month 2, with visibility-score lift becoming clearly attributable by month 3-4. Earlier wins are possible if the audit surfaces a single high-impact gap (e.g. one missing schema type, one tier-1 PR placement opportunity).

A realistic 12-month trajectory for a brand starting at 8-12% category visibility:

- **Months 1-3:** baseline established, structural fixes shipped (schema, headings, internal linking), score nudges to 14-18% - **Months 4-6:** first PR placements land, content density on tracked-prompt topics builds, score moves to 22-28% - **Months 7-9:** reference-graph wins start landing (G2 / Built In / aggregator presence), score reaches 32-38% - **Months 10-12:** compounding effects kick in (older content keeps citing, the citation graph self-reinforces), score lands in the 40-50% range

We report attribution in the monthly review: which pieces moved which signals, what worked, what we're adjusting for next cycle.

## The promise behind the cadence

The hardest part of GEO is the consistency. Most teams know what to do; few sustain the monthly effort across 12 months of competing priorities. Rankply is built so that consistency happens by default — the calendar exists, the team owns the work, the dashboard makes the lift visible. You don't have to remember to do it.

That defaults-driven design is what makes the difference between teams that compound GEO investment over years and teams that try it for a quarter and give up. The work isn't hard; the discipline is. We carry the discipline so you don't have to.

## Plan flexibility

Standard fits most early-stage brands. Plus is right when you're scaling and need higher publication volume + premium scan. Pro is for brands defending a category position with concentrated tier-1 placements. You can switch between tiers any cycle without penalty.

For brands with very specific needs (regulated industries, multilingual delivery, enterprise legal review), we offer a custom tier on rankply.com — get in touch via the dashboard support widget and we'll scope it.

## What the calendar actually looks like

The `/dashboard/calendar` view shows every scheduled piece for the current cycle and the next, colour-coded by type:

- **Long-form articles** (blue) — slated for your owned blog or syndicated to a partner outlet - **Social posts** (green) — LinkedIn long-form, Reddit comments, Substack pieces - **Page rewrites and schema upgrades** (purple) — work on your existing site - **Outreach** (orange) — PR pitches, podcast booking, aggregator submissions - **Audit triggers** (grey) — automatic refresh runs, no action needed from you

Each card links to the brief, the draft, the approval status, and (post-publication) the citation impact attribution. You can drag cards to reshuffle the schedule, leave comments for the editorial team inline, and set per-piece overrides on the default 48-hour approval window.

## The briefing loop

The brief editor is where most of the long-term steering happens. It's a living document with sections for:

- **Positioning statements** — the one-paragraph elevator pitch we anchor every piece to - **Topic priorities** — what you want covered this quarter, ranked - **Forbidden territory** — topics, claims, or comparisons you don't want made (e.g. legal-sensitive areas, contested terminology, competitors you don't engage with publicly) - **Voice rules** — short/long sentences, formal/casual register, British/American spelling, signature stylistic moves - **Citation preferences** — sources you trust, sources you avoid, formats you prefer

Customers who keep the brief current see better content quality month over month; customers who set it once at onboarding and never revisit drift toward generic output by month 6. We send a quarterly nudge to revisit the brief specifically because of this pattern.

## Edge cases and how we handle them

**You go quiet for a month.** Default behaviour: the cycle ships on schedule, content auto-publishes after 48 hours, we attribute the lift in your absence. If you'd rather the team hold publication, set the override in your brief.

**A piece needs heavy revision.** Two rounds of revision included in every cycle, third round triggers a polite note about scope. We'd rather ship one excellent piece than three mediocre ones.

**You have a launch / news event mid-cycle.** Drop a note in the dashboard; the team reshapes the cycle to support the launch within 48 hours. We hold one editorial slot per cycle for exactly this reason.

**Underperforming piece.** If a published piece isn't moving citations after 60 days, it gets flagged for refresh or unpublication. Sometimes content just doesn't work; sunsetting it is better than letting it dilute your site's average authority.

The system is intentionally flexible. Most months are predictable; the months that aren't are when the dashboard and the team earn their keep.