Two different clocks are running. The first is indexing. Once a new page is crawled and indexed it can be retrieved and quoted almost immediately, so a well written service page can start appearing in AI citations within a week or two. The same goes for a corrected Google Business Profile. That is the fast lane, and it is why fixing obvious gaps pays off noticeably sooner than most owners expect.
The second clock is trust. Getting named as a recommendation, rather than cited once in passing, depends on your business being confirmed in several independent places: your site, map listings, directories, reviews, local mentions. That accumulation is slow by nature. Three to six months of consistent publishing and listing work is a realistic window for a local business starting from a thin footprint, and competitive categories in big metros take longer than that.
Be wary of both extremes you will hear. Nobody can promise you a spot in ChatGPT next week, and nobody should tell you this takes two years before anything moves. Measure the leading indicators monthly instead: pages indexed, questions where you get cited, tools that name you, and referral sessions from AI tools in your analytics. Those shift well before the phone starts ringing differently.
Send the site over. We will tell you what is broken, what you could rank for, and whether AI search knows you exist. No charge and no pitch deck.
