9 months of GEO work, finally broke through in month 10. What the step-function looked like.

Filed this post under 'wins' because it eventually was one, but months 1-9 felt like losses.

Background: devtool in a mid-competitive category. Not CRM-level saturated, but 4-5 incumbents with 3-7 year head starts on training data. I did everything right — schema, comparison pages, G2 reviews, Reddit answers, llms.txt. Moved from GEO Score 0 to GEO Score 18 in 9 months. Basically invisible.

Month 10: one post hit HN front page. Not my best writing, honestly — a debugging post-mortem that resonated with the right people at the right time. 340 upvotes over 6 hours.

What happened to citations over the following 6 weeks:

• ChatGPT (search-on): 4% → 34% mention rate
• Perplexity: 12% → 41%
• Google AI Mode: 2% → 19%

The 9 months of groundwork mattered. The HN post by itself wouldn't have stuck if there wasn't already a web of comparison pages, reviews, and schema for AI engines to triangulate. The spike found a lattice to anchor to.

But also — i'm not going to pretend the first 9 months weren't demoralizing. They were. At month 7 I genuinely considered killing the GEO program entirely. Glad I didn't, but I understand why people quit at that point.

If you're at month 6-8 with minimal movement: keep one eye on your category saturation. Some categories just require a viral trigger, no matter how good your execution is.