AI search answers
How long does GEO take to work?
Short answer: First citations typically appear four to twelve weeks after new content and off-site mentions go live. That window is set by how often each engine re-crawls and re-indexes, not by how fast the work is done. Plan on at least ninety days for momentum you can measure, and expect results to compound rather than switch on.
Weeks 1–4: access and foundation
The technical layer lands first — crawler access, extractable answer structure, structured data, llms.txt — and the initial content cluster starts publishing. Nothing visible changes in AI answers yet, because nothing has been re-crawled yet.
Weeks 4–12: first citations
This is the window where names start appearing. It shows up unevenly: one engine picks you up on a narrow question weeks before another does, because each runs its own crawl and retrieval schedule. The monthly visibility scan is what makes that visible instead of anecdotal.
Day 90 onward: compounding
Coverage widens as the cluster grows and the off-site corroboration accumulates. Older posts get refreshed rather than abandoned, because a stale page that once earned a citation loses it to something newer.
What makes it slower
- A brand-new domain with little existing crawl history
- A category where every competitor is already publishing sourced content
- No proprietary data or named expert to create information gain
- Crawler blocks that are only discovered weeks in
People also ask
- Can anyone guarantee a citation by a specific date?
- No, and treat any such guarantee as a warning sign. No one controls a model’s crawl schedule or its answer generation.
- What should I look at in the first month?
- Crawler access, whether your pages contain extractable answers at all, and the baseline visibility scan. Those are the leading indicators.
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GEO by MyFast.ai publishes the sourced content, seeds the off-site conversation and scans six engines monthly so you can see exactly where you stand. $1,499/month, no contract.