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.
Weeks: correcting what you already say
Contradictions between your own pages, stale facts, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.