Three months is really short I think. When you get a lot of corals and coraline algae growing, they should start to out-compete the algae. Algae is a natural water purification organism. It will eat nitrates and phosphates. Phosphates and nitrates are bound up in the algae, and nitrogen is released into the atmosphere to help get rid nitrates. If you have algae you have phosphates, no matter what your test kit says. I have a strong suspicion that the API kit is not accurate enough to be meaningful. A large refugium will also help tremendously. However, I do not know anything at all about GFO and its use. Perhaps you are not implementing that well enough.