What to expect in the first 90 days of a GEO engagement

In the first 90 days of a GEO engagement, expect mostly diagnosis, cleanup and setup. GEO (generative engine optimization) is the work of making your business easy for AI answer tools such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot to find, understand and cite. A typical first quarter records how those tools describe you today, fixes what stops your pages from being crawled and understood, rewrites your most important pages so they answer questions directly, starts the off-site work, and sets up reporting.

What you should hold at day 90 is a list of completed work and a baseline you can measure against. You should not expect a promised number of citations or a guaranteed spot in any AI answer, because nobody controls what an AI model says. Some changes can show within weeks once pages are recrawled and indexed. Citations and brand recognition tend to build over months, and no honest agency will put a date on them.

The sequence below is typical, not universal. Agencies order the work differently, and the right order depends on what your audit finds. Use it to judge a proposed plan and to prepare what your side must supply.

The 90 days at a glance

This table describes work and deliverables, not results. Treat the month labels as a rough order.

Before day one: what to agree in writing

The first 90 days go better when four things are settled before work starts.

• The scope for the quarter. A list of what will be audited, fixed, written and reported. If you buy a monthly plan priced by hours, ask how the hours are tracked and how priorities are set each month.
• The engines and prompts being measured. A prompt is the question typed into an AI tool. Agree which engines are tested and roughly which questions, and who keeps that list if you part ways.
• Who approves what. Name one person who can sign off on page changes, and say which changes need legal or compliance review.
• What is not promised. The agreement should describe work and reporting. Our guide to GEO guarantees and red flags explains why a promised placement is a warning sign.

Contract terms are a legal matter. This article is not legal advice, so have your own attorney review any agreement before you sign it.

Month one: access, baseline and audit

Kickoff and access

Work starts with a conversation and a set of logins. Google's own advice says your SEO "should ask questions about what makes your business unique, who your competitors are, how search results can help, and how your customers find you." Expect the same from a GEO team.

On access, Google's page "Do you need an SEO?" says that at the audit stage you should "only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don't grant them write access)." Widen access when changes begin, and keep every account in your company's name.

Baseline

A baseline is a dated record of where you stand before anything changes. For GEO it usually has three parts:

1. Prompt tests. The team asks a fixed set of questions in the agreed engines and records whether you are mentioned, how accurately you are described and whether your site is cited as a source. AI answers vary from one run to the next, so one test is a snapshot. Ask how many times each prompt was run.
2. First-party reports. As of October 2026, Search Console has a Generative AI performance report that shows impressions in Google's AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report, launched as a public preview in February 2026, that counts citations of your pages across Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. Google Analytics 4 has an AI Assistant channel for visits that arrive from tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot.
3. Ordinary search data. Indexing, rankings, organic traffic and leads. GEO builds on these, so they belong in the baseline.

If your site has never been verified in Bing Webmaster Tools, setting it up is a month-one task. Our guide on how to benchmark your current GEO health covers a do-it-yourself version of this step.

Audit and plan

The audit looks for the reasons AI tools might miss or misdescribe you. It normally covers whether crawlers can reach your pages, whether key pages are indexed, whether your business facts match everywhere they appear, whether your pages answer the questions customers ask, and what other sites say about you. Google states that to appear in its AI features "a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet," so plain indexing problems come first.

The output should be a prioritized task list, not a score. Each item should say what is wrong, what fixes it, who does it and how much effort it takes. A separate article explains what a GEO audit includes and what you should get back.

Month two: site and content fixes

This is where your site starts to change, and where your team is needed most.

Technical fixes

Typical items are a robots.txt file that blocks crawlers you want, pages that can't be indexed, broken internal links and slow templates. Which AI crawlers to allow is a business decision as much as a technical one, and our guide to AI crawlers and robots.txt walks through it.

Consistent business facts

Your name, address, phone number, services, service area, prices and credentials should say the same thing on your site, your Google Business Profile and your main listings. This is dull work. It also removes the conflicting details, such as an old address or a service you dropped, that any reader or AI tool could otherwise pick up.

Rewrites of priority pages

The team picks a small number of pages that matter for revenue and rebuilds them around direct answers: what the service is, who it suits, what it costs or what drives the cost, how it compares, and the questions buyers ask. Expect drafts that need an expert on your side to check them. An agency can't know your warranty terms or your clinical protocols unless you tell it.

Structured data, also called schema markup, may be added where it matches what is on the page. Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI says structured data "isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add." Treat it as support for good content.

Ask for a change log. Google's hiring advice suggests asking a provider, "Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?"

Month three: off-site work, re-testing and the first full report

Off-site work

No AI company publishes exactly how it weighs what other sites say about you. The practical, low-risk steps are completing and correcting profiles you already control, getting listed where your industry is listed, and earning mentions through real expertise, partnerships and press.

Two cautions apply. Google says that "seeking inauthentic 'mentions' across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem." And US advertising rules cover paid endorsements and reviews, so ask whether any placement the agency arranges is paid and, if so, how it is disclosed. Month three usually starts this work and does not finish it.

Re-testing and reporting

The team reruns the baseline prompts in the same engines and compares the results, then pairs that with the first-party reports and your search and lead data. A useful report says what was done, what changed, what did not change, and what happens next. You should be able to check the numbers in your own accounts.

Keep the limits of each source in mind. The Search Console report is based on impressions. Microsoft says its citation counts are shown "without indicating placement or presentation within a specific answer." GA4 only sees visits that arrive with a recognized AI referrer, so it can't show a mention that produced no click. Our guide on how to measure GEO performance goes deeper.

What you need to provide

What should not be promised in 90 days

• A specific placement. Google's AI guide says plainly, "Indexing and serving aren't guaranteed." OpenAI says in its help center that ads "do not influence ChatGPT's answers," so by OpenAI's account a place in an answer is not something an agency can buy for you either.
• A fixed date for results. How quickly a change shows up differs by engine and by how often your pages are recrawled. Our article on how long GEO takes to work explains what tends to move first and what is slow.

How the sequence varies

Three things commonly change the order of work.

• How you buy. A fixed project front-loads the audit and fixes. A monthly plan priced by hours spreads the same work out and reorders it as priorities change. Neither is wrong, but the calendar looks different.
• The state of your SEO. If key pages aren't indexed or the site is hard to crawl, month two may be entirely technical and the content work moves later.
• Your size and industry. A business with many locations has far more facts to reconcile. Healthcare, legal and financial content needs extra review, which slows publishing.

As one published example, eSEOspace's GEO service page lists five steps: audit and baseline, entity foundation, answer-first content, corroboration and reach, and measure and refine. The page gives no month-by-month calendar for them, and other agencies name and order their steps differently.

Conclusion

The first 90 days of GEO are about getting the facts straight: where you stand, what is broken, what your key pages should say, and how progress will be measured. By day 90 you should hold a dated baseline, a change log, a before and after comparison and a plan for the next quarter. Judge the quarter by that work, and give results the time they need. If you want to see where you stand before hiring anyone, you can request a free GEO audit from eSEOspace. More guides are in our GEO and AEO Guide.

Frequently asked questions