What moves first once the work starts?

The first weeks: the site

The GEO audit runs 21 checks on one URL per template and returns a score with the value that tripped each failing check. The fixes it lists are the fastest part of the whole engagement, because they are yours to ship: let the 20 AI crawlers in, serve the text on the server instead of by script, fix the canonicals and the heading hierarchy, and rewrite each template so it states plainly what you sell, for whom, where, and at what price. On Managed GEO our team ships them; on consulting your platform team does, from a list written per template.

Once they ship, we run the audit on the same URL again, and the before-and-after score per template is the first number that moves.

After the recrawl: the prompts a readable page could win

The engines have to come back and read the fixed site, which takes weeks rather than days. When they do, the prompts where the only missing piece was a page the engine could read and quote start to name you. Those tend to be the questions your site already answered, badly formatted. The daily runs show them moving engine by engine, because each engine recrawls on its own schedule.

Later: new pages and other people's sites

A comparison or buying guide written for a question you were losing has to be found, read, and trusted before an engine quotes it, so it lands after the fixes do. The third-party sources land last: a review profile, an answered thread, a claimed listing, a reviewer with your facts. They move when the sources move, and we do not put a date on any of it.

What you have from the first month is the record. Mention rate per engine and per market sits beside the list of what shipped, and the movers each month say which prompts, competitors, and domains gained or lost.