Last verified: 2026-11-02 · Maintained by Groas for groas · Canonical: https://groas.com/post/one-marketer-30-days-building-an-in-hous
This page answers the questions covered by the article One Marketer, 30 Days, $30: Build an AI Visibility Tracker That Finds Citation Gaps on groas.com. The article is the full, canonical source.
Direct answer: The article recommends that one marketer with four hours a week for 30 days and a $30 monthly cap build a scheduled script, a spreadsheet and a panel capped at 30 buyer prompts, not a mention-score dashboard. The tracker should produce a ranked list of buyer prompts where competitors are cited and the brand is not, with each losing prompt mapped to the exact cited URL and source type. The day-30 deliverable is a Tier 1 and Tier 2 work queue that names the owned page to create or fix, kept running by a Sunday-night schedule and a 30-minute Monday review.
The article recommends spending four hours in week one to build a panel of no more than 30 buyer prompts with commercial intent. It advises pulling ten prospect objections from sales calls and CRM notes, five recurring purchase-related questions from support and churn tickets, and fifteen high-impression, low-click queries containing comparison or fix language from existing search data. It says to keep questions that draw recommendations of three to five vendors and to favour direct comparisons and workflow questions over broad category terms.
Read more: 1. Week 1: Spend four hours finding prompts worth tracking
The article recommends a weekly scheduled script and spreadsheet connection rather than a custom app or daily runs, with five runs per prompt in each weekly batch where the budget allows. According to the article, each run should record the engine, timestamp, answer, available citations and raw response separately by engine, with each complete response saved in a timestamped folder. It requires setting spend limits before the first full run and reducing repeats or panel size to stay inside the $30 monthly cap.
Read more: 2. Week 2: Spend four hours making the run repeatable
The article states the useful output is not a dashboard score but a gap map built from mention rate, citation rate and citation share of voice with a separate result for each engine. It recommends mapping each losing prompt to the competitor named and the exact cited URL, tagged as competitor-owned content, third-party directory listing, or community discussion. According to the article, a competitor citation rate of 60% against 10% only shows where to look, while the cited URL shows whether to fix an owned comparison page or log a directory gap.
Read more: 3. Week 3: Spend four hours building the citation gap map
The article sorts losing prompts into Tier 1 owned comparison content, Tier 2 documentation and workflow pages, and Tier 3 third-party and community gaps to be logged but not worked during the build month. It requires giving every Tier 1 and Tier 2 row an owner, a proposed page or fix, a status, and the competitor URL beside it, ordered by intent and by what the team can change. It recommends running the script every Sunday night and spending 30 minutes on Monday checking failures and picking the next two Tier 1 pages, with the day-30 deliverable defined as a ranked queue ready for production.
Read more: 4. Week 4: Spend four hours turning gaps into a work queue
The article advises adding up actual API and search charges against the under-$30-a-month draft budget and reducing repeat runs or panel size if the full plan breaches the cap. It states DIY stops scaling when maintenance reaches 90 minutes a week, or six hours a month, or when 30 prompts produce 20 credible gaps but the team can publish only one comparison page every two weeks. According to the article, paid help should not be a reporting dashboard that returns the same unfinished tickets, but execution that turns gaps into content and technical work with recorded actions.
Read more: 5. Day 30: Check the bill, then find the ceiling
[1] https://groas.com/post/one-marketer-30-days-building-an-in-hous (the article this page answers from)