How Long Does It Take a New Website to Gain SEO Traffic?

It depends. n the niche but there a sandbox of a couple of months for all new content.
 
Indexing is fast trust isn't. That's usually the part that take time.
@sabellaava nailed it -> indexing is fast, trust isn't. The "3 to 6 months" everyone keeps repeating is answering the wrong question.

You get indexed and grab longtail scraps in a few weeks. The commercial terms that actually pay? Google sits on those for 9 to 18 months while it works out whether real people care about you. An apparel store I do links for took until well into year two before the money keywords locked, 336 of them in the top 3 now. No content sprint shortcuts that, it is a trust gate, not a content gate.

The biggest time-waster I see -> rewriting the whole strategy every six weeks because month three looks flat, then resetting the clock every single time. Pick the targets, build relevant links steadily, walk away. Patience is boring but it is most of the job.
 
I think with today's brutal sandbox, it realistically takes 6 to 9 months to see consistent organic traffic, but you can massively speed that up, and avoid mistake of waiting on single posts by dropping tight intent clusters of 6 to 8 interlinked articles all at once to force Google to recognize your topical authority
 
For me it usually takes around 3 to 6 months before traffic becomes consistent publishing regularly and targeting easier keywords made the biggest difference
 
For informational sites, I would not expect stable traffic too fast. In the first months Google still needs to understand the site its structure, authority and whether people actually find answers there. My new site started showing real results only after about 6 months and noticeable traffic came closer to one year.
But separate low-competition pages on my car blog can start getting traffic from Google in 3–7 days. More competitive pages usually need 1–3 months. If it is a service site in a small GEO, results can come faster, sometimes in days or weeks.
What helped me most was not just publishing more pages, but building a tight structure: internal links, clear clusters, fast loading and normal navigation.
 
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