Define
Establish the entity, category, audiences, journeys, offerings, markets, target prompts and key relationships.
The MAPS Method
Define. Prove. Distribute. Enable.
The MAPS Framework tells you what needs to be true. The MAPS Method turns those conditions into four workstreams: Define, Prove, Distribute and Enable. They overlap on purpose because real marketing, SEO and product work rarely fits into a single box.
Prove
Support claims and relationships with expertise, outcomes, research, customer proof and independent corroboration.
Distribute
Place retrievable evidence across search, publishers, communities, reviews, partners, marketplaces and relevant platforms.
Enable
Make evidence accessible, structured, extractable, verifiable and, where applicable, actionable by machines.
Keep it reliable: apply Consistency, Utility, and Measurement & Validation across every workstream.
Open the full process diagram ↗
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01
Define
Start with the entity and the demand around it. Define category, audience, buyer, user, offering, markets, journey, target prompt universe and the relationships you need the web to express.
- Canonical entity definition
- Audience and journey map
- Prompt library
- Entity/relationship map
- Competitive and market scope
02
Prove
Turn positioning into evidence. Support priority claims and relationships with expert knowledge, proprietary data, outcomes, customer proof and independent corroboration.
- Claim-to-proof map
- Original research and data
- Case studies and outcomes
- Expert authorship
- Reviews, coverage and partner proof
03
Distribute
Put the evidence into the information ecosystem. Do not chase every citation source. Prioritize the places that matter to the audience, the prompt and the business.
- Core search coverage
- Fan-out query coverage
- Publisher and community presence
- Review/partner/directory coverage
- Market and platform-specific distribution
04
Enable
Make the evidence easy for machines to access and use. Fix technical blockers, clarify structure, declare entities and relationships, and expose current actionable data where needed.
- Crawlability and rendering
- Information architecture
- Structured data and identifiers
- Extraction and verification readiness
- Transactional data readiness
The control loop
Consistency, utility and validation are not optional extras.
Consistency
Maintain the identity. Reconcile stale facts, changed products, renamed entities and conflicting third-party profiles.
Utility
Ask whether the asset is genuinely useful after an AI answer exists. Proprietary evidence, current data, decision support and task completion are difficult to commoditize.
Measurement & Validation
Use stable prompt sets, document test conditions, separate visibility from business impact, and retest interventions under comparable conditions.
Start with the constraint, not the tactic.
Before adding schema, pitching journalists or publishing another article, work out whether the problem is Meaning, Authority, Presence or Signals. Do not boil the internet. Find the constraint first. The audit is designed to make that obvious.