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A serious GEO program produces measurable results in 8 to 16 weeks, with full category-defining visibility typically achieved in 6 to 12 months. The timeline breaks down into four phases. Phase one (weeks 1–2) is the audit and entity build — Harch Atelier runs a baseline visibility report across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude, then deploys schema.org Organization and Person markup, claims the Wikidata entry, and cleans up NAP data across the top 30 third-party directories. Phase two (weeks 3–6) is content production — 20 to 40 priority pages are rewritten into answer-first format using GLM-4 to generate candidate drafts at roughly 25x lower cost than GPT-4, with human editors validating tone and accuracy. Phase three (weeks 7–12) is the citation-monitoring ramp — weekly crawls across the four engines show citation rate climbing from baseline (typically under 5 percent) to 25–40 percent in the target query cluster. Phase four (months 4–12) is the persistent-training play — third-party mentions on Wikipedia, G2, Crunchbase, and industry press accumulate until the next model checkpoint ingests the brand as a category exemplar, lifting spontaneous (zero-retrieval) citation rate from under 10 percent to above 40 percent. The exact timeline depends on three variables: how authoritative the domain already is (older domains with existing organic traffic see results faster), how competitive the query cluster is (a niche B2B category with three competitors is faster than a mass-market category with fifty), and how aggressive the content production cadence is. Harch Atelier, based in Casablanca, has run 12-week programs that lifted client citation rate from 0 to 4 engines citing — book a free audit at /subsidiaries/atelier to get a tailored timeline.