Do we sign a long-term contract?

Most engagements run 6 or 12 months, with shorter advisory or diagnostic projects available where the scope genuinely calls for assessment rather than execution. We don’t run 30-day programs because the work runs on the search and AI engines’ timeline, not a calendar a vendor picks.

Why 6 to 12 months is the honest floor

The term length isn’t an arbitrary minimum – it tracks how long the underlying systems take to register a change. Two distinct clocks govern the work:

• The search clock. Google crawls continuously and re-ranks with each crawl, so a well-placed authoritative result can begin moving within days to weeks. But durable repositioning – rankings that hold rather than decay – reflects authority that accumulates over months, not a one-time push.
• The AI clock. Retrieval-first engines (which run a live web search per query) can reflect an updated source within days to weeks. Engines leaning on their training corpus only change when the model is retrained or fine-tuned – a cycle that runs months – which is why an AI engine can keep repeating outdated information for some time after the source has been corrected.

What the term actually buys

Six and twelve months is roughly the window in which both clocks resolve: enough time for new content and entity signals to be crawled and re-weighted, for authoritative coverage to accumulate the durability that survives a normal news cycle, and for AI engines to re-retrieve or retrain against the updated sources. Where the client genuinely needs an assessment rather than execution, a short-term diagnostic or advisory project is the right fit. Where the work is execution, the term is structured to match the time the work actually requires.