It isn’t one timeline
AIEO bundles three activities with very different speeds: fixing what you publish, restructuring how you publish it, and building corroboration elsewhere. Reporting them as a single programme guarantees the expectation is wrong, and a wrong expectation is what gets the work cancelled.
The three also depend on each other in one direction only. Corroboration amplifies whatever your site says; restructuring makes what you say retrievable; correcting contradictions determines whether either is worth doing. Run them out of order and the slow one does nothing.
Weeks: correcting what you already say
Contradictions between your own pages, stale facts, inconsistent naming, and missing basics are fixable immediately and propagate as engines re-read your site. This is the fastest-moving work and where a 30-minute audit usually finds most of its value.
The reason it moves quickly is that nothing has to be earned. You are not persuading anyone to link to you or waiting for authority to accumulate — you are removing the ambiguity that was suppressing a recommendation you were otherwise eligible for.
Weeks to a month: structural changes
Rewriting pages so passages stand alone, adding question-shaped headings, and stating specific facts affects eligibility for citation fairly quickly, because it changes whether a retrievable chunk exists at all.
Speed here depends on how often your pages are re-read, which varies by site and by engine. A site with steady publishing and healthy inbound links refreshes faster than a static brochure site that hasn’t changed in two years — so the same edit lands sooner on an active site.
Fixing what you publish moves in weeks. Changing what others publish about you moves in quarters.
Quarters: authority and corroboration
Being described consistently by independent sources is slow by nature — and it is precisely why it is defensible. Corroboration is the moat, and moats are not built in a sprint.
It is slow for compounding reasons: securing a mention takes time, the source has to be crawled, and the effect appears only once several sources agree. A single new mention rarely moves anything; the fifth consistent one often does, which makes progress feel absent right up until it isn’t.
What makes it slower than the average
Three conditions extend every horizon. A brand new domain with no history has nothing to amplify — which needs its own sequence. A contested category with well-established incumbents means you are competing against years of corroboration. And a business that will not publish specifics has capped what any of the work can achieve.
The third is the only one you control completely, which is why it is the first thing worth changing.
Measure movement, not arrival
Because there is no rank position, progress shows up as appearance rate against a fixed prompt set and as improvement in how you are described. Both need a stable prompt set and monthly review to be legible at all.
Set the baseline before the first change, not after. Teams that start measuring in month three cannot demonstrate the fastest-moving improvements, because those already happened — and the improvements they can show are the slow ones that haven’t landed yet.
The realistic shape
Expect visible change in how engines describe you within the first month or two, and changes in whether you are recommended over a longer horizon. A programme judged at week six on the second measure will be cancelled just before the first one pays off.
How to report it so it survives
Separate the three streams in every update, with its own expectation attached. Lead with description accuracy, which moves first and is verifiable by anyone in thirty seconds. Report appearance rate as a trend rather than a number. And state plainly that corroboration is a quarters-long line so nobody is surprised by a flat month — the report structure that keeps the work funded.