How long until AI answers change
Perplexity picks up a new page in days. Google AI Overviews takes weeks. ChatGPT is slowest and least predictable. If you publish today, six to eight weeks is a fair point to check whether anything moved.
SEO
Search engine optimisation. Making a page rank in the ten blue links.
Everything that has always mattered: what the page is about, whether other sites link to it, how old the domain is, how fast it loads.
It is not dead. Google AI Overviews are built from pages that already rank, so a page nobody can find in normal search doesn't end up in an AI answer either.
Why the three differ
Perplexity searches on every question and runs its own index that refreshes constantly. A new page can appear in an answer within days of being published.
Google AI Overviews builds answers from pages that already rank. So the page has to be crawled, indexed, and then rank well enough to be pulled in. Crawling can take days. Ranking takes longer.
ChatGPT searches through Bing and reads three or four pages. Two things have to happen: Bing has to index the page, and the page has to reach Bing's top few results for that question. Bing indexes more slowly than Google, and being fourth is the same as not existing.
What makes it faster
An established domain. A site the engines already crawl often gets picked up in days. A domain published last month can take weeks before anything happens.
A question nobody has answered. If four pages compete for a question, a new fifth one can enter the set quickly. If four hundred compete, it won't.
Being findable. A page nobody links to and nothing points at can sit unindexed indefinitely. Submitting it in Search Console and linking to it from your own site helps.
What makes it slower
A crowded question. "Best CRM software" is settled. Displacing what's there takes more than one page.
A page on a new domain with no links. The engines have no reason to crawl it.
Waiting for one engine to prove the point. If you only check ChatGPT you'll conclude nothing happened, because it's the slowest of the three.
What "changed" actually looks like
Not a position. There isn't one.
Ask the same question twice and you can get different answers. The sources shift, and the model picks differently even from the same sources. So a single run tells you nothing.
What moves is frequency. Before: named in two runs out of ten. After: named in six. That's the measurement, and it only exists if you ran it enough times before you changed anything.
A realistic timeline
Week 1 — page is live and crawlable
Week 2–3 — Perplexity may start citing it
Week 4–8 — Google AI Overviews, if the page ranks
Week 6–12 — ChatGPT, if Bing has indexed it and it reaches the top few results
Some pages never get cited at all. That's normal, and it's usually the question that was wrong,