The 12-month AI SEO roadmap for a mid-sized maritime company

This is the roadmap we run for mid-sized maritime clients starting from a low-to-moderate AI SEO baseline. Mid-sized here means a company with revenues between roughly twenty million and two hundred million dollars, a marketing team of two to six people and a website that exists but has not been built with AI search in mind. The plan is realistic, sequenced and tested across multiple categories.

Months 1 to 2: Baseline and triage

The baseline AI visibility audit

Run a thorough audit covering thirty to fifty buyer-realistic prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini. Score citation rate, mean position and competitive set. Document the URLs cited and not cited. This is your ground truth.

The structural triage

Audit your top ten service pages for structural extractability, schema validity and factual specificity. Audit your llms.txt (or note that you do not have one). Audit your robots.txt for accidental AI crawler blocks. Audit your fact base across website, LinkedIn, industry directories and recent press for consistency.

The deliverables for months 1 to 2

A baseline audit document. A prioritised triage list. A twelve-month plan with named owners for each workstream. The plan should be no more than ten pages.

Months 3 to 5: Structural fixes and llms.txt

Fix the foundations

This is the work that everything else depends on. In sequence:

• Implement Organization, Service, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList schema across the site. Validate every page in Google’s Rich Results Test.
• Publish or rewrite llms.txt with eight to fifteen curated URLs and a dense factual block.
• Reconcile the fact base. Pick canonical numbers (fleet size, founding year, office locations, certifications) and propagate them everywhere.
• Update industry directory listings, classification society partner pages, association membership pages.

Why this comes before content

Content rewrites done before the structural foundation is fixed get re-done. Content rewrites done after the structural fixes compound on a stable base. The order matters.

Months 6 to 8: Service page rewrites

Rewrite the top ten service pages

Pick the ten pages that drive the most strategic value. For each, follow the AI summarisation pattern: factual opening paragraph, H2-segmented sections, lists for parallel facts, FAQ block with at least three questions, validated Service and FAQPage schema.

This is the highest-impact content work in the year. Done well, it moves your citation rate by ten to twenty percentage points across category-defining prompts.

Build out two case studies in claim-and-evidence form

Pick two case studies that exemplify your strongest capabilities. Rewrite them with specific numbers, named vessel types where confidentiality permits, named regions, named outcomes. Implement Article schema with named author byline.

Months 9 to 11: Authority building

Pursue tier-one trade press features

By this point your fact base is consistent, your service pages are strong and you have something specific to offer journalists. The placements work better in this sequence than they would have at month one, because you have substance to back the pitch.

Aim for two substantive features in TradeWinds, Lloyd’s List, Splash, gCaptain or The Loadstar. Offer original data, a named executive on the record and a clear angle. Generic outreach will not work; data and access will.

Strengthen the directory and partner ecosystem

Re-audit your class society listings, your industry association profiles and your partner pages on equipment, software or service vendors you work with. Many maritime brands have a dozen partner pages out there with stale or absent information about them. Fix every one.

Pursue Wikipedia citation if appropriate

If your company or your published analysis can credibly support Wikipedia citation (notable scale, coverage in trade press, original data), pursue it patiently and through proper channels. Do not pay for it, do not edit your own article aggressively. Build the conditions; let editors do the rest.

Month 12: Measure and re-plan

Run the quarterly audit again

Use the same prompt set, same engines, same scoring methodology as the baseline. The trend over the four quarterly readings is the headline metric. Citation rate, mean position, share of voice, URL-level pattern.

Calculate the share-of-voice movement

For each direct competitor, your share of voice in citation responses has either grown, held or shrunk. The first two are wins. The third is a problem to address explicitly.

Re-plan the next twelve months

The first twelve months are mostly foundational. The next twelve are mostly compounding. The plan for year two looks different: more depth on existing capability pages rather than first-pass rewrites, deeper trade press relationships rather than new ones, more selective structural improvements, more publishing cadence.

What this roadmap is not

It is not a cheap fix. It is also not a marketing campaign you can outsource entirely without internal involvement. The roadmap requires roughly two days a week of marketing-team time, one developer engagement and consistent senior-leadership backing for media access.

It is also not a guaranteed result. Your category, your starting position, your competitors’ moves and the underlying model evolution all affect the outcome. What the roadmap does deliver, in our experience, is a meaningful and durable improvement over four quarters that compounds into a structural advantage by the end of year two.

Most mid-sized maritime companies do not run this kind of plan. The ones that do, starting now, will look back in 2027 and see they took a position their competitors cannot easily catch up on.