How long before an AI engine starts naming us?

Three clocks, not one

The work lands in three layers, and each has its own clock. The first is your site. Crawler access, text in the page, the files an engine reads first: those go live in the first weeks, and the engines recrawl the pages soon after. The audit re-run shows that layer done, because the score moves on the day we ship.

The second is what we publish. Service, location, and question pages have to be found, read, and then trusted enough to be quoted, and engines name the businesses they can read and corroborate. That takes longer than a recrawl, and it is why the writing starts in month one rather than after the technical work is finished.

The third is the layer we do not own. Engines build local answers out of directories, review sites, and threads on Reddit, and those update on their own schedule, not ours. A directory that puts a rival first keeps putting them first until its own listing changes. We show you which of those sources the engines lean on for your trade, but we cannot set their calendar.

What you can hold us to instead

From the first month, the report shows your mention rate for your city, engine by engine, next to the list of what shipped. That pairing is the honest measure: you can see whether the pages went out and whether the answers moved, in the same place, every month. Visibility in AI answers builds on itself, so the second month stands on the first. If the numbers are not moving, that is a conversation we would rather have early than late.