How long before the first results?

First LLM citations: 4 to 8 weeks after structured content goes live. First internal GEO score lift: 60 to 90 days. Citation share at cruising speed: 6 to 9 months. Significant LLM referral traffic (>50 sessions/month): 9 to 12 months for a B2B SME, 4 to 6 months for an already-authoritative mid-cap.

How long before the first results, implementation-side?

The « how long does it take » question doesn't behave the way it does in SEO. In classic SEO, you wait for indexing (weeks) then for ranking (months). In GEO, three distinct mechanics run in parallel, each on its own clock.

Short horizon (2 to 8 weeks), the real-time retrieval window. Modern answer engines (ChatGPT with search mode, Perplexity, Claude with web search, Google AI Overviews) don't pull answers from the pre-trained model alone: they crawl in real time when the user types their question. A page that is well-structured, Schema.org-marked-up and explicitly allowed to OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot can start being cited within a few weeks. Per OpenAI's own documentation, robots.txt changes are processed within about 24 hours.

Medium horizon (3 to 9 months), knowledge graph consolidation. Beyond retrieval, LLMs lean on indirect memory layers: training fragments, native knowledge graph, Wikidata entry, indexed press mentions. These layers consolidate over months. In our observations on the GEO Rocket portfolio, a fresh Wikidata entry is recognised by most LLMs within 6 to 12 weeks; an authoritative press mention (L'Echo, Paris Match) gains citation weight over 3 to 6 months.

Long horizon (12 to 36 months), training consolidation. Foundation models are re-trained every 6 to 18 months. "A brand that becomes a stable reference in its vertical eventually enters the pre-training corpus, and that is the most durable effect: the citation persists even when retrieval is off," explains Lorenzo Eeman, founder of PROEMA. That's the strategic horizon. The useful first-mover window in GEO is typically 18 to 36 months, the period during which an early actor locks the citation position before competitors arrive in bulk.

Concretely, across the GEO Rocket portfolio (expertcafe.be, zeroproof.one, expertvin.be), the first LLM citations usually appear between 4 and 10 weeks after structured pages go live, with a stable ramp-up over six months. None of these numbers is a contractual guarantee, performance depends on the vertical, on existing competitive density and on the depth of external authority (Wikidata, press, third-party mentions).

Counterintuitive finding. Across the GEO Rocket portfolio tracked from April 2025 to May 2026, the median delay between publication of a GEO-native asset and first citation by Perplexity is 11 days, versus 34 days for ChatGPT search and 56 days for Google AI Overviews. The gap is structural: Perplexity runs a live fetch on each query, ChatGPT and Gemini depend on their periodic indexing sweep.