When Should You Expect to See Results from SEO and GEO?

If you’ve been feeling discouraged by the chaos of search right now, here’s the surprising truth: This is the best moment in years to invest in high-quality content. 

What do I mean? Well, as more teams publish AI slop—or give up entirely when early traction fades—there’s a massive opening for brands willing to do real, differentiated work. Across Healthyish Content clients, rankings are moving faster, traffic is compounding sooner, and conversions are rising because the bar for quality has quietly collapsed.

Nowhere is that more true than in health. The category has its own gravitational pull: medical review, personal experience, citations, and trust signals that AI simply can’t fake. In a world full of generic, model-generated explainers, human healthcare content backed by real expertise immediately stands out.

That combo—a crowded field, collapsing quality, and a category where trust is non-negotiable—has created a rare arbitrage moment, and the brands investing today are pulling ahead.

And that brings us to what most teams want to know: how this momentum actually plays out over time. Below is the timeline we’re seeing across dozens of sites—what moves quickly, what takes longer, and where the biggest opportunities sit.

SEO Growth Expectations by Domain Authority Tier

Before we jump into timelines, let’s talk about Domain Authority (or DR, if you’re staring at Ahrefs all day). These scores aren’t from Google, but they’re the best proxies we have for how much trust a site has earned across the internet: how many sites link to you, how reputable those sites are, how much content you’ve published, and how consistently you’re doing it.

Higher authority means Google is more willing to test your pages and rank them quickly. Lower authority means you’re building credibility brick by brick. The timelines vary dramatically depending on where you start–or at least that’s what we see time and time again. That’s why we’re using this as a general way to separate what success to expect, how fast, and by when.

Domain Authority <25: New or Low-Authority Sites

This is the “prove yourself” tier. Early Healthyish Content client Radial lived here—DR 7, no track record, just a newborn domain trying to convince Google it deserved a seat at the table.

For Radial, the lift came unusually fast. Once we started publishing content in August—and because the technical foundation was already strong—we saw meaningful gains across traffic, rankings, and domain authority within the first month. The months of “flatline” before that were simply the site’s pre-launch phase, not true stagnation. As DR climbed into the high 20s, the traffic curve rose right alongside it. 

This is a great example of the arbitrage happening right now: When strong content meets solid technical SEO, results can arrive much sooner than most teams expect—especially compared to the traditional, slow-burn timelines most new sites face.

New sites also usually face the unofficial-but-very-real “sandbox” period where Google holds visibility back until it’s confident you’re not spammy or dangerous. Luckily, Radial burst through that pretty quickly.

Nonetheless, you don’t get to skip the line–and that’s especially true in health. You need consistent publishing and credible backlinks. And not all backlinks carry the same weight; the bigger and more reputable the referring site, the stronger the vote of confidence.

Here’s the pattern we see repeatedly with Healthyish clients:

• 0–3 months: This is trench work. Traffic is minimal or nonexistent, and that’s normal. Your job here is to set the whole ecosystem up correctly: site structure, URLs, internal linking, schema markup, the works. Google is crawling you, but it’s still deciding if you’re worth showing to anyone. A few backlinks may land, but they’re not moving mountains… yet.

• 3–6 months: This is when the first green shoots appear. Long-tail keywords—the oddly specific searches no one else is targeting—start popping into the top 10. Your main keywords are still hanging out in positions 20–50, inching upward as your authority grows. Clicks tick up. It’s not “explosive,” but it’s unmistakably forward momentum.

• 6–12 months: Now you start to feel the engine turning over. Main keywords move from that 20–50 pocket into the top 10. New content ranks faster. Old content suddenly jumps a page or two with small updates. Internal links start doing real work. You’re not drowning in traffic yet, but the people finding you are the right people, and conversions start showing up.

• 12+ months: This is the breakthrough stage. For brand-new sites, it usually hits somewhere between 12 and 16 months—12 if you’re actively building strong backlinks, closer to 16 if the link growth is fully organic. Top-10 rankings stack up, traffic compounds, and Google stops treating you like a flight risk.

  
  

Domain Authority 25–50: Established Sites

This tier is where things start to feel fun fast. Sites in the 25–50 range already have a baseline of trust. This is the group where we see traction show up more quickly, especially in health, where high-quality content fills gaps that AI-generated fluff simply can’t.

Healthyish Content client Oshi is the blueprint here. When we started, the site was already sitting above DR 40 with no real content strategy in place. That combination—solid authority, empty shelves—is exactly where growth can spike. 

Once we began publishing, rankings started showing up almost immediately. And even though the DR chart looks flat, it’s mostly a trick of the scale: DR has actually climbed to around 50 (+10), which is a meaningful lift for a site starting that high. The traffic curve, meanwhile, tells the real story: a steep, consistent rise that accelerated after AI Overviews rolled out. Oshi had the authority, so the moment it had the content, Google opened the door.

We’ve seen this same pattern with client Midi–and now client Allara appears to be following the same trajectory: strong baseline authority + high-quality content = fast, meaningful lift.

Here’s how this tier typically plays out:

• 0–3 months: Assuming nothing technical is blocking you, at least one article should hit within the first three months (often within weeks). Most new pieces start ranking quickly because Google already trusts the domain. (This is not the rule, of course, just something we often see).

• 3–6 months: This is where things get exciting. Pages often slide into the top 10 right out of the gate. Growth is incremental but very noticeable, and early wins stack up fast.

• 6–12 months: The curve starts bending upward. Rankings compound, traffic accelerates, and CRO becomes a priority because the volume is finally there.

• 12+ months: This is the leap. Consistent publishing across a trusted domain produces big year-one lifts with traffic, keywords, and conversions all rising together. And because this tier starts with built-in trust, the leap tends to be larger and smoother than what we see in the <25 group.

  
  

Domain Authority 70+: High Authority Sites

Once you cross into the 70+ range, you’re playing a different game. Ranking isn’t a grind here. Instead, it’s more like turning on a faucet. High-quality content takes off quickly, and performance mostly comes down to how consistently you publish and how well that content matches real search demand.

Healthyish Content client Truemed is a great example of what this looks like in practice. When we started working with them in June 2025, the site was around DR 70—already an elite-level domain—and has since climbed to roughly 75. (The chart compresses the growth visually, but a +5 jump at this level is massive.) 

Traffic responded immediately. Rankings improved within weeks of publishing, early surges tracked directly to new content drops, and even before a full-scale content push, the trend line was decisively up.

Here’s the typical pattern at this stage:

• 0–3 months: This is “authority mode.” Content is indexed within a day (sometimes hours), and early rankings show up within weeks. One or two pieces often hit the top 10 immediately because Google already trusts the domain.

• 3–6 months: Momentum compounds. Most new articles enter the top 10 quickly, and many begin ranking for dozens (or hundreds) of long-tail terms as soon as they’re published. Traffic lifts are clear and predictable. 

• 6–12 months: This is where the scale shows up. Publishing cadence becomes the primary driver of growth because the domain can support rapid expansion. Internal links carry more weight, category pages strengthen, and content depth starts producing noticeable gains across entire topic clusters. 

• 12+ months: With sustained publishing, authority sites can see year-over-year leaps even without major DR increases. This is usually when brands start dominating competitive keywords, outranking legacy players, and building true ownership over their vertical. At this tier, growth is more about deploying content strategically than earning trust.

  
  

GEO: Faster Wins, but a Bumpier Ride

If traditional SEO is the long, steady climb, GEO (sometimes also called AEO) is the opposite. It moves fast, breaks often, and behaves more like the early days of Google than anything we’ve seen in years. 

Visibility in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLMs tends to correlate with classic SEO signals—authority, clarity, topical depth—so your Google investments pay off here, too. 

But the ride is much bumpier, and the volume is still small compared to traditional search. LLM-driven traffic currently represents roughly 1% of total sessions for most sites, yet it converts at 4.4 times the rate of traditional visitors, according to Semrush’s AI search study. The catch is volatility: one week you see a major breakthrough because a model latches onto your content; the next week, an update re-tests everything and reshuffles the deck.

And because the landscape is still forming, small tweaks can make large ripples. Clean content hierarchy, clear medical sourcing, and differentiated point-of-view all help models choose your content over the generic stuff. But hacks don’t last long. Anything that looks too engineered tends to get dialed back in the next model update.

These are the levers that help you gain traction faster in Gen AI search:

• A backlink outreach strategy: Actively building high-quality backlinks can cut timelines in half. Strong, trustworthy referring domains make both Google and LLMs more confident in you.

• Selecting easier keywords: Lower-difficulty topics get picked up faster and can snowball your authority inside models and search.

• Existing topical authority: If you’re already ranking well for related terms, new content tends to get adopted quickly (both in Google and in conversational systems).

• Newsworthy topics: Timely or emerging subjects often get surfaced quickly, though the wins can be short-lived.

• Strong technicals: This is one of the biggest factors. Fast site speed, clean code, zero critical errors, and rock-solid internal linking create a clear path for both crawlers and LLMs to understand your content. The more our clients treat technical work as a major priority, the more their performance curve reflects it. 

  
  

As of today, we haven’t seen a “typical pattern” emerge based on site authority across LLMs. Besides the biggest correlation being performance in SEO/traditional Google search, we’re still experimenting and learning here to find what works best and on what timeline.

Looking Ahead

So where does all of this go? TBH, no one knows. Search is shifting faster than it has in a decade, LLMs are reshaping discovery in real time, and we may be heading toward a world where many answers come from conversational interfaces rather than traditional results pages.

What hasn’t changed is the need for trust. Expertise, medical review, and real human experience still carry weight. Even ChatGPT goes out of its way to say it won’t play the doctor—a reminder that verified, high-quality health content isn’t something AI can replace.

And when you look at keyword snapshots across Radial, Oshi, and Truemed, the pattern is consistent: Once a site builds real authority and publishes consistently, rankings climb whether in Google, AI Overviews, or the LLMs pulling from your work. 

The future is uncertain, but the opportunity right now is unusually strong. Teams investing in quality, technical strength, and authority are winning today and positioning themselves to win in whatever comes next. And, of course, if you’re interested in learning more about working with Healthyish Content, don’t hesitate to reach out.