# What Happens in the First 90 Days After You Hire a Managed AEO Agency?

> In the first 90 days, OnlyAEO audits your AI visibility, learns your brand on one call, publishes articles you approve and reports where AI names you monthly.

URL: https://onlyaeo.com/blog/managed-aeo-agency-first-90-days · Published: 2026-10-19 · Author: Tejas Patil

- **What OnlyAEO does first:** once you sign, the team learns your brand, checks your website, connects publishing and starts researching articles from the questions your buyers ask AI.
- **Your part:** one kickoff call, a sample of your strongest writing and the facts AI must state correctly, then your approval on every piece before it goes live.
- **Every month:** articles on your site, YouTube videos, a report on where AI names you and who it names instead, and a review that sets the next month's plan.
- **When results show:** first measurable results usually take at least 60 days.
- **What to ask any agency:** what it needs from your team, what it checks before anything goes live, and how it reads progress when AI answers change from day to day.

## What does an AEO agency audit before you sign, and is it free?

OnlyAEO starts with a free audit: in a 30-minute call, it asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity the questions your buyers ask, live, and shows you which brands they name instead of you. You leave with a baseline and can measure your own curve against it from the start.

A full audit can go wider. The FastTrackr AI baseline, dated February 11, 2026, covered 11 model families and buyer prompts spread over 10 personas.

## What happens month by month after you sign?

After the onboarding call, OnlyAEO runs the same monthly cycle again and again: a report, content you approve, and a review together.

| Month | What OnlyAEO does | What you provide | What you can judge |
|---|---|---|---|
| First month | Kickoff: the team learns your brand, checks your website, connects publishing and builds the Context graph. Research and briefs (built in batches of 20) come before any drafting | The inputs in the next section, then approvals | Whether each draft sounds like you and gets your facts right |
| Second month | A fresh audit, then articles and videos made to your plan | Review input | That month's report |
| Third month | The same cycle, including the monthly audit of live pages for what earns citations | Approvals | Progress against your audit baseline |
| After the third month | The cycle keeps running, and each month's report card re-scores existing articles so weak ones join the rewrite queue | Review input | The new scores, and which articles are next in line for a rewrite |

OnlyAEO's pages set out the order of the work but give no calendar date for each step. Ask for those dates at kickoff, the first go-live date included, and ask any other provider for the same.

## What do you need to provide, and how much of your team's time does it take?

OnlyAEO needs one 30-minute onboarding call, your best writing and the facts you want AI to get right, then your approval on each piece.

- **The brand call.** Together with your writing and facts, it is how the team learns your brand and your buyers.
- **Your best writing.** The team learns your voice from it, so send the pages you'd be happy to see quoted back to you.
- **Facts and compliance rules.** At the start, the team learns your approved facts, your compliance rules and the claims you can and can't make.
- **Timely access and approvals.** Under the Terms of Service, you provide accurate brand information, timely access and approvals, and the rights needed to publish on your behalf. Delays in access or approvals may affect timelines and deliverables.
- **Access to publishing.** Articles can go into any CMS, so have whoever owns your site grant access early.
- **The tracking install.** LLM Attribution goes in through a WordPress plugin, a Cloudflare Worker or Next.js middleware (what it shows is covered below).
- **Your input at the monthly review.** You weigh in on what worked and the plan for the coming month.

There's no published hours figure for your team's time. On a managed plan, OnlyAEO's team runs the platform and does the AI search work, and your team reviews and approves every piece before it goes live.

Everything you hand over goes into the Context graph, which connects to Search Console, WordPress, Drive, Slack, Gmail, YouTube and your decks. The [how it works page](https://onlyaeo.com/how-it-works) lays out the full order of work.

## Can AI engines read your website, and what gets fixed first?

OnlyAEO makes sure every AI can read your site and fixes what blocks it. That check is part of the start, since an engine can't cite a page it can't fetch.

OpenAI and Anthropic both cover this in their crawler documentation. [OpenAI's crawler page](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots) warns that a site opted out of OAI-SearchBot is left out of ChatGPT search answers, although it may still surface as a navigational link.

[Anthropic's crawler guidance](https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler) says disabling Claude-SearchBot keeps a site's content out of its search index, which may reduce the site's visibility in Claude's search results.

## How long until the first article goes live, and what is checked first?

The first article goes live once the research is done and the draft has passed every check below. There is no published date for it (see the note under the month-by-month table).

For the research, OnlyAEO asks the AI engines your buyer's question and reads what they found. Each draft then has to pass these checks before it goes live:

1. Facts checked against sources.
2. Your brand voice.
3. Every link tested.
4. An independent score of 85 or higher.
5. Your approval.

Before a page ships, the team also tests that ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can pull the answer out of it. A page that is easy to quote still has to carry your name inside the sentence an engine lifts.

In an [Ahrefs experiment on self-promotional content](https://ahrefs.com/blog/self-promotional-content-ai-seo-experiment/), 43% of answers that cited one of its conference-promoting pages never mentioned the conference at all. We cover the fix in [why AI cites your page but not your brand name](https://onlyaeo.com/blog/why-ai-cites-your-page-but-not-your-brand-name).

## What else ships in the first months besides articles?

On the Foundation plan, the monthly work covers the AI report card, articles on your site, 2 to 3 YouTube videos and a monthly strategy. The Authority plan adds a second editorial review on every piece, 5 to 7 videos a month, and listings and outreach.

- **Videos.** The team plans, scripts and packages them for your own YouTube channel.
- **Listings and outreach, Authority plan only.** This work puts you on the comparison sites, reviews, listings and publications AI already reads in your category. The methods are monthly PR, publishing on other sites and community seeding.

Third-party pages did most of the work in the same Ahrefs experiment: when Ahrefs broke into an empty answer slot, 94% of the new mentions came from third-party content and only 6% from answers citing its own pages.

OnlyAEO scopes plans on a call, and its [pricing page](https://onlyaeo.com/pricing) lists what each plan includes.

## What is in the monthly report?

OnlyAEO's monthly report scores you on three things: your share of citations, how often answers mention you, and how often engines recall you (LLM recall frequency). The report also shows where ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude name you, who they name instead and what the team will do about it next, and every gap it finds becomes work.

A fresh AI visibility audit lands monthly or bi-monthly and opens each cycle.

- **Recommendations counted on their own.** An answer that recommends you gets its own tally, kept separate from answers that only name you or link to your page.
- **Tracked vs worked on.** Our AI visibility platform tracks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek and Grok. The work itself targets all consumer-grade and paid LLMs and AI assistants, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI (Muse), Instinct and more.

## How long does it take to see results from a managed AEO agency?

In the usual case, OnlyAEO's first measurable results arrive no sooner than 60 days in; from there, visibility builds over the following months as engines pick up more pages, videos and mentions. OnlyAEO will not promise you a specific ranking, citation or placement in any AI answer.

Part of the wait sits outside any agency's control. [Google's guidance on AI features](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features) says crawling can take anywhere from several days to several months, depending on how often its systems decide a page needs refreshing. Google's recrawl documentation puts a requested crawl at a few days to a few weeks.

[HubSpot's guide to AI search visibility ROI](https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/ai-search-visibility-roi) gives its own planning ranges: allow 30 to 60 days before citation rates change, and 90 to 180 days before those gains show up as measurable pipeline influence. On that timeline, day 90 falls after the window for citation changes and at the start of the window for pipeline influence.

Buyers use these engines in the meantime. G2's 2026 buyer behavior research found that most buyers had sourced software recommendations from an AI chatbot in the last 24 months.

## How do you know the first months are working?

OnlyAEO reads progress through several signals, from AI crawlers reading the new pages to AI-referred visits and citations, though it does not promise specific citations. Here is what each one shows:

1. **AI crawlers read the new pages.** LLM Attribution recognizes 170+ AI crawlers and logs which pages AI bots read, so you can see when a new page has been read. The crawlers it captures include GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Google-Extended, Meta-ExternalAgent and Applebot-Extended.
2. **AI-referred visits and pipeline.** It also shows which AI answers send visits and pipeline, including AI-referred visits GA4 misses. More on the [LLM Attribution page](https://onlyaeo.com/llm-attribution).
3. **Citations and mentions.** The monthly report measures both, as set out above.
4. **Re-scored articles.** The report card gives existing articles new scores (see the table above).
5. **Movement against the baseline.** Each fresh audit shows where you stand next to the free audit's starting point.

One day's answer is not a signal; the next section explains why. OnlyAEO's own Terms call AEO a long-game, compounding channel.

## Why do AI answers move around in the second and third months?

AI answers change often, so a single check on a single day says little about a trend. In an [Ahrefs study of AI Overview changes](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-change), content tended to change every 2.15 days on average, and nearly half (45.5%) of cited sources were entirely new from one observation to the next.

- **Runs differ.** An April 2026 arXiv paper notes that answers can vary across runs, prompts and time, which makes one-off observations unreliable.
- **Trends need weeks.** HubSpot, in its [AEO guide for content strategists](https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/aeo-guide-for-content-strategists), recommends "reviewing performance across multiple days or weeks before evaluating trends or drawing conclusions".

So judge the program on the monthly cycle.

## What did the first months look like for FastTrackr AI?

FastTrackr AI began the OnlyAEO program at 0.1% visibility and #338 of 458 brands; about 100 days later it ranked as its category's #3 most-cited brand and #4 most-cited source. Over the same stretch its visibility reached 26.7% and it climbed 335 leaderboard places. That is one client's result.

A follow-up audit dated August 26, 2026 put fasttrackr.ai at #2 among the most-cited sources in its category, with 110 citations. Read the full [FastTrackr AI case study](https://onlyaeo.com/case-studies/fasttrackr-ai).

## What should you ask any AEO agency at each stage of the first months?

Put the same questions to every provider, OnlyAEO included. Under each one is what a good answer sounds like, followed by ours.

### Before you sign

- **Which engines does the baseline cover, and how many buyer questions?** Expect both named and the question list shared. Our answer: the engines named in the free audit above.
- **Is the baseline dated, and when is it run again?** It should carry a date and come with a rerun schedule. Our answer: a fresh audit opens each cycle (see the report section).
- **Are results split by buyer persona?** Ask to see the split. Our answer: the FastTrackr baseline spread its buyer prompts over distinct personas.
- **Will you promise a placement by a date?** The right answer is no, with a reason. Our answer: no, as the results section states.

### At kickoff

- **How much of my team's time will this take?** A good agency lists the recurring asks. Our answer: one call to start, then approvals and the monthly review, as set out above.
- **Can anything go live without our approval?** It shouldn't. Our answer: no, your approval is one of the checks listed above.
- **Who owns what you publish?** You should, and any exceptions should be named. Our answer: you own final deliverables on full payment, except our pre-existing materials and general know-how, which we keep and may reuse.
- **How do you keep AI drafting on brand?** Listen for written rules and a human check. Our answer: brand guardrails, voice profiles and topic constraints set up with you, and we strongly recommend a human review step before publishing.
- **Where does our brand information live, and who keeps it current?** Look for one record with one owner. Our answer: the Context graph, which our team keeps current.

### When the first articles go live

- **Which AI crawlers does the site check cover, and who makes the robots.txt changes?** A good answer names both. Our answer: we fix what blocks AI from reading your site (see the website section).
- **Who checks facts, and who scores each piece?** You want named sources and a scorer other than the writer. Our answer: both are among the checks listed above.
- **How do you write our brand into the claims engines quote?** Your name should sit inside the quoted sentence. Our answer: see the guide linked above.
- **Who publishes, and does the page keep our design?** Ideally the agency does, in your design. Our answer: our team, in your design, with images, links and schema attached.

### When the first monthly reports arrive

- **Do you count recommendations separately from mentions?** They should, with a separate tally. Our answer: yes.
- **Which engines does the report track, and which does the work target?** Expect two separate lists. Our answer: both are in the report section.
- **What counts as a first result, and when do you expect it?** Listen for a measure and a range, not a promise. Our answer: see the results section.

## Is OnlyAEO's managed plan the right fit?

OnlyAEO is an AEO platform that tracks where AI names your brand and creates the content to change it. Its managed plan suits a company that wants its AI search work done for it: one team runs all of it for you end to end, with AI, and gives every client the same attention.

- **Good fit.** A marketing team with no spare hours for production, clear facts it can stand behind and someone who can approve drafts quickly.
- **Weaker fit.** A team that wants a software login to run the work itself, or a vendor that will guarantee placements.

## More questions about the first months with OnlyAEO

### What can we tell our security team when it reviews OnlyAEO as a vendor?

Tell them OnlyAEO is SOC 2 Type II compliant. Then point them to the list of tools the Context graph connects to, in the section on what you provide.

### Who is our day-to-day contact during the first months?

You get one point of contact and a regular review with your team, and our team is always a call or a message away.

### Can we change the scope or stop the engagement?

Scope and deliverables are defined in your Service Agreement, and recurring plans renew until cancelled under it. Either party may terminate an engagement as set out in that agreement.

### What if AI still does not name us after the third month?

OnlyAEO's Terms say AI models and their ranking behavior change continuously and are outside its control. The work doesn't stop at the third month, though: the same monthly cycle keeps running, as the last row of the month-by-month table shows.

### Can OnlyAEO publish articles in other languages?

Yes. The managed plans cover articles in other languages as well as English.