How long does it take to show up in AI search?
Page-level fixes can change citations within weeks, because retrieval systems fetch live. Authority changes take months, because they depend on mentions accumulating across independent sources. Anyone promising a fixed timeframe is describing a system that does not behave that way.
What moves in weeks
Structure and extractability. Putting the direct answer in the first paragraph, making each section self-contained, adding specifics a model can quote, and unblocking the AI crawlers in robots.txt. Perplexity and ChatGPT search fetch pages at query time, so a rewritten page can be cited from the next crawl.
What takes months
Corroboration. Being mentioned across enough independent sources that a model treats you as a safe answer is an accumulation, not a switch. Branded search demand behaves the same way — it builds and then persists.
This is why the sequencing matters: fix the page-level work first because it is fast and it gates everything, then let the authority work compound underneath it.
Baseline before you start
Record citation share, branded impressions in Search Console, referral traffic from AI sources and third-party mention count before changing anything. Without a baseline there is no way to tell a working programme from normal variance, and retrieval varies a great deal run to run.
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