Expect the phone to move somewhere between thirty and ninety days, and expect it to keep improving for about six months after that. Which end of that range you land on depends on things that are knowable before anybody starts. This is the long version of a question on the page about local and AI search, where the short answer is the same one.
What follows is why the range is a range, what moves first, and the honest signs that it isn’t working so you’re not waiting on something that was never going to arrive.
Why nobody can give you a date
Three things decide the speed, and only one of them is the work itself.
Where you’re starting. A business with an unclaimed listing, eleven reviews and no site has a lot of cheap ground to make up, and it tends to move fast because the basics were never done. A business that already ranks fifth and wants second is fighting for inches against four competitors who are also trying.
How hard the category is. Two competitors in a small town is a different job from forty personal injury firms in a metro. The work is the same; the resistance isn’t.
How fast Google notices. This is the part nobody controls. Changes have to be crawled and reassessed, and that isn’t instant even when everything is done correctly.
The order things move in
Some of it is nearly immediate. That’s the part people miss.
Listing work shows up fastest. A profile that was half-filled and is now complete, categorized properly and carrying real photographs can start being shown more within days, because nothing has to be earned. It was already eligible and it wasn’t being served.
Reviews move next. They influence both what ranks and whether anybody calls the thing that ranked. A steady arrival of new ones is one of the few signals that acts quickly.
Pages take longest. New content has to be found, assessed and trusted. That’s the part that runs on months rather than weeks, and it’s why the curve keeps rising after the first movement.
What “working” should look like at each stage
Weeks one to four. Not much on the phone yet. What should be visible is activity: the profile complete and being viewed more, reviews arriving, pages published rather than promised. If nothing has been done in month one, that’s not a slow start, that’s a supplier problem.
Days thirty to ninety. The phone should start to move. Not transformed, but noticeably different from the month before, and traceable to search rather than to a season or a referral.
Months three to nine. The compounding part. Rankings settle higher, more search terms start producing calls, and the cost of each new customer falls because the traffic isn’t rented.
The things that genuinely slow it down
A suspended or unverified listing. Everything else waits behind it, and reinstatement takes weeks.
Inconsistent name, address and phone number. Cheap to fix, and it quietly holds back everything else while it’s wrong.
None of those are exotic, and that’s the point. Most of what SEO specialists do in a first month is find and clear things like them, which is also why the first month rarely looks dramatic from outside.
A slow website. If the page takes six seconds on a phone, ranking better just delivers more people to something they’ll abandon.
Changing direction every few weeks. Rewriting pages, switching categories, and starting over resets the clock on the part that was already accruing.
Does AI search change the timeline?
It changes what you’re waiting for more than how long you wait.
AI answers are assembled from sources the model already trusts, which for a local business means your listing, your reviews, and pages that clearly state what you do and where you do it. Those are the same things that move local rankings, so the work doesn’t split into two jobs.
What is different is that being cited in an answer can happen before you climb into the top three, because an answer isn’t a ranked list. It draws on whatever states the fact plainly. A business with a thin site and a strong, consistent listing sometimes shows up in the answer before it shows up where it expects to.
The practical effect is that some of the early movement arrives somewhere you weren’t watching. It’s worth checking.
When to conclude it isn’t working
This is the question underneath the question, so here’s a straight answer.
At sixty days, you should be able to see the work: what was published, what was fixed, how many reviews arrived. If nobody can show you that, stop paying.
At ninety days, you should see movement in something measurable: profile views, calls from the listing, searches you now appear for that you didn’t before. Rankings alone are the weakest of these, because ranking for something nobody searches isn’t progress.
At six months with no measurable change and no credible explanation, the honest conclusion is that it isn’t working. A supplier who responds to that with a request for more time and no evidence is telling you something.
What we’d tell you on the phone
Ask for the baseline before anything starts: calls this month, where you currently rank for the handful of searches that actually matter, how many reviews you have today. Written down, before work begins.
Without that, ninety days from now you’ll be arguing about whether it improved instead of looking at whether it improved. That’s the whole reason the work is written down in advance rather than described after the fact.
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