40 levers to make AI search cite your brand first.
Every lever is effort-rated, cost-rated, and mapped to its prerequisites. Pick your industry and company size. The 40 levers re-rank for your context. Every claim links to verifiable primary research, with deeper reading on lawrencehitches.com for each lever.
40 levers, re-ranked for your context.
Pick your industry and company size. The 40 levers re-rank with priority badges and dim the ones that don't fit. Click any lever for the full scorecard, effort, cost, prerequisites, KPI, expected timeline, and deeper reading.
Personalise the playbook
Which levers unlock which.
Ship in this order. Layer 0 levers have no prerequisites, start here. Each subsequent layer depends on levers completed in prior layers. Most teams try to ship Schema Slam (Lever 15) or Newsroom (Lever 40) first and get nothing from it because Layer 0 isn't done yet. Click any lever to see its full scorecard.
Ready-to-use execution templates.
Three CSV files, pre-sorted by priority for your industry. Import straight into Airtable, Notion, Linear, or any project tool. Status / owner / due / evidence columns included.
Ecommerce edition
40 levers sorted for ecommerce priority. Merchant feeds, PDP schema, retailer backlinks surface first.
Download CSV →SaaS edition
40 levers sorted for SaaS priority. Head-to-head comparisons, use-case matrix, research hub surface first.
Download CSV →Local services edition
40 levers sorted for local priority. Entity anchor, FAQ goldmine, trust shield, reviews surface first.
Download CSV →This is a living document.
Every time a new primary source drops, the affected lever updates and an entry appears here. Subscribe below to get each update in your inbox.
All 40 levers now have a verifiable external source
Eight levers that previously shipped with evidence-only statements (no external citation) now link to specific studies: AI conversion rate research (12M-visit study), FAQ schema → AI Overviews correlation (Frase), Google Dec 2025 Core Update E-E-A-T analysis, Core Web Vitals ranking correlation, Search Engine Land hreflang research, Zyppy 23M-internal-links study, RankPay rich snippets CTR data, Search Engine Land brand-to-links ratio research.
Renamed plays → levers, stripped person attribution, added internal reading per lever
- "Plays" renamed to "Levers" throughout
- Person-name attribution removed; sources cite the actual content
- Each lever now links to deeper reading on lawrencehitches.com
- Levers without verifiable external research kept the evidence statement; source line was omitted (closed in v1.3)
Industry filter, scorecards, dependency graph, downloadable CSVs
- Every lever has effort, cost, prerequisite, KPI, and timeline ratings
- Industry selector re-ranks the 40 levers for SaaS / ecommerce / local / B2B / media
- Company size filter dims levers below a certain revenue band
- "Execution sequence" section groups levers into four dependency layers
- Three downloadable CSV templates, ecommerce, SaaS, local
Initial 40-lever launch
Playbook published with 40 levers across Content, Technical, and Earned categories.
I run this playbook for a small number of clients each quarter.
If you'd rather have someone implement Layers 0, 1 on your site than read 40 levers, that's what I do.
Book a 20-minute AI visibility call →Every cited stat and study links to original research.
Where a lever's evidence statement could not be traced to a specific verifiable URL, the source line was omitted rather than guessed at. The list below is what's actively cited in the playbook.