10/22/2026
"How long until we see SEO results?"
Google finally put numbers on it.
At Search Central Live in Barcelona, Gary Illyes shared Google's internal timelines:
→ ~20 hours to discover a new page
→ ~30 days to recrawl an existing one
→ 1–3 months to process a site migration
→ 3–6 months to recover from a core update
Then we compared it to AI search.
Google AI Mode cited 36% of new pages within 24 hours in one test. ChatGPT search? 10%.
But here's the part most people miss: Google's AI features run on the same crawl and index as regular search. No crawl, no index, no AI citation.
AI search isn't a shortcut around SEO. It runs on top of it.
Full breakdown (with sources) is linked in the comments. 👇