A lot of legal tech teams that start AEO work give up around week six. Not because it failed, but because nothing obviously moved — and they were judging it against the only timeline they know, SEO’s six to twelve months. Nobody has published a credible AEO timeline, so buyers borrow the wrong one. The honest version is faster in some ways, slower in others, and it looks nothing like a ranking chart.
The one public test with a stated sample size came from Semrush, which tracked 81 new pages every day for a month. Google’s AI Mode picked up a third of them on day one, then dropped most of them again by day thirty. ChatGPT started slowly and kept climbing, citing about four in ten by the end of the month. Semrush sells software in this space and ran the test on its own site, so the exact numbers will not transfer to a legal tech company. The shape will.
That shape changes how you read any check-in. Look at Google on day thirty and the work looks like it failed. Look at ChatGPT on the same day and it looks like it worked. Neither reading is true yet.
It also changes what a partner should report at the thirty-day mark. The honest update is not “we’re up” or “we’re down.” It is which tool moved, in which direction, and whether that matches the curve you would expect this early. A single blended visibility score at day thirty averages two different stories into one number that means neither.
BrightEdge tracked thousands of prompts in February, and roughly 97% of the sites being cited did not move at all from one week to the next. That is the whole case against weekly AEO reporting in a single number. A weekly report mostly tracks noise — and a team that reacts to noise ends up rewriting pages that were fine.
Ninety days buys a baseline, not a ranking.
Days 1–30: can the AI tools see you? This part runs on their clock, not yours. Google says crawling can take anywhere from several days to several months. OpenAI runs separate crawlers for separate jobs, and only one of them — OAI-SearchBot — decides whether you can show up in ChatGPT search. Plenty of legal tech companies blocked it by accident when security locked down anything with “GPT” in the name.
Days 31–60: change what they find. This is the slow part: pages that answer the questions buyers actually ask, plus a presence on the third-party sites these tools lean on. Resist the urge to rewrite everything to sound quotable. One review of the research points out it can make pages harder to find, not easier.
Days 61–90: set the baseline. Which buyer questions you show up for, which you don’t, who shows up instead, and which changes moved anything at all. That list is the real deliverable of the first quarter.
Open your robots.txt file — or ask whoever manages the site to. Look for OAI-SearchBot. If it is blocked, either directly or by a broad rule, nothing else in the first thirty days matters until that is fixed. OpenAI says a change takes about a day to register, which makes this the fastest win in the whole program.
So the useful question at the start isn’t “when will we rank?” It’s “what will we know by day ninety that we don’t know now?” A partner who can answer that is describing real work. One who promises results inside the window is describing a curve the data says does not exist.
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