Salience Strategy
How long does generative engine optimization take to work? Our numbers by month
6 October 2026 · Jakob Greenfeld
On the one company we have full numbers for, the monthly count of calls from Google and AI answers went 4, 4, 7, 21 from June to September 2026. That company is Sales.co, which the same founder runs, so read it as one case.
| Month (2026) | Calls booked with Google or AI as the source |
|---|---|
| June | 4 |
| July | 4 |
| August | 7 |
| September | 21 |
The work on sales.co started on 31 August 2026, and 63 new pages went live in September. On 1 October we published 7 more pages, one per narrow question. Four days later, four of them were in Google's top 10 for their question.
What moves when
- First month: pages go live and get indexed. A page for a long-tail question can rank within weeks, because few pages answer it.
- First to third month: calls from those pages start to show. At Sales.co the jump came in the first month of work.
- Slower: answers given with search off. Those come from training data, which changes only when a new model version ships.
We do not promise a date or a number of calls. Search results and AI answers are decided by third parties.