When to start SEO
Two different answers, because the plumbing and the writing start at different times.
Split it in two. The foundations go in at your first paying customers: answer-shaped pages, schema, an llms.txt file, and getting into the roundups your buyers already read. That is an afternoon with a coding agent and it compounds for months, so starting late costs months you cannot recover. Writing content for search waits until about a thousand a month, because until then you do not know which words your customers use, and guessing the words is how people produce fifty articles nobody searches for.
What should I do early?
The plumbing, at your first paying customers. It is cheap, it is one-time, and it is the only part of search work that pays off while you sleep.
Answer-shaped pages
Question as the heading, answer in the first two sentences. Analysis of 1.2 million ChatGPT answers found 44.2 percent of citations came from the first 30 percent of a page, so front-loading is not a style preference.
Schema
FAQPage, HowTo, ItemList, Article. Gives machines an unambiguous read on what each page is. Covers almost everything you will need.
An llms.txt file
Generate it from data you already have. A study across nearly 300,000 domains found no correlation with citations, so do it because it is free, not because it works.
Get into the lists your buyers already read
The highest-value item here and the only one that is not on your own site. Those pages are already being read by the models. Yours is not yet.
When should I start writing content?
At about a thousand a month, once you have had enough conversations to know the exact words customers use for their problem. Those words are your keywords, and no research tool will give you them as accurately as twenty conversations did.
Start with the pages that catch people who are already looking rather than people who might be interested: comparison pages, alternatives pages, integration pages, and the how-do-I questions your support inbox already answers. Those convert because the reader has a card in their hand. Broad top-of-funnel articles are the slowest possible way to spend the same effort.
Not yet
- Volume. Ten pages that each answer one question beat fifty that circle a topic, because a model cites a passage and volume does not improve passages.
- Programmatic pages built from one data source with nothing original in them. Google’s scaled content abuse policy covers exactly that shape.
- Keyword research before customer conversations. You will get plausible words instead of real ones.
Good to know
When should I start SEO for a startup?
Foundations at your first paying customers, content at about a thousand a month. They are different jobs on different timelines and treating them as one is why SEO gets started either too early or too late.
Is SEO dead because of AI answers?
No, but the winning shape changed. Search rewarded pages that covered a topic. AI answers reward passages that answer a question, which means front-loading, numbers and a stated position.
What should my first pages be?
Comparison and alternatives pages, and the questions your support inbox already answers. All three catch people who are already looking rather than people you have to interest first.
This expands the First stretch camp on the climb, which lays out the stages either side of it. Tools by job are on the route index, the free ones are here, and the other answers are in insights. Updated 30 July 2026.