The question people ask after their first check is almost always "okay, so how often do I run this thing?" And the honest answer is somewhere between your instinct and the overkill your tools suggest.
Weekly feels responsible but is mostly exhausting. Yearly feels doable but tells you almost nothing useful. The right cadence is monthly — with a few sensible exceptions.
Why monthly is the sweet spot
AI answers don't change on a daily rhythm, but they do shift. Sources get crawled, pages get updated, engines re-rank who they trust. Monthly is fast enough to catch meaningful movement and slow enough that you're not chasing noise.
It also lines up with a practical feedback loop. You fix a couple of things, wait, rerun next month, and see whether the fix landed. That's a clean experiment. Weekly doesn't give fixes time to register, and quarterly forgets what you changed three months ago.
When to go weekly (rarely)
There are a few moments where checking more often makes sense:
- A rebrand or rename — You want to track whether the new name actually reaches AI answers, because a stale answer here is damaging.
- A launch or a crisis — When accuracy matters in the moment, weekly snapshots for a few weeks are justified.
- After a big content overhaul — Rerun a month out, but you might check twice in the first month to confirm movement started.
Aside from those, weekly just adds noise. You'll be tempted to chase tiny dips that are random variation.
When to go quarterly (for a specific reason)
Quarterly suits teams who simply want a low-effort pulse and nothing more. It's a fine floor — better than never — but you'll miss the correlation between your changes and the result, because three months is a long time to remember what you touched.
If you're only going to do it once a quarter, that's okay. Just keep the query set identical so you can still compare across quarters.
What to compare — the discipline that makes any cadence work
The frequency matters less than what you compare. Each run should be judged against your own last result, never a vanity target or a competitor's number you can't verify.
Look for three changes:
- Did a fail turn into a pass? That's proof your fix worked.
- Does an engine mention you that didn't before? That's attribution improving.
- Did the gap between your website score and AI score narrow? That's the foundation and the payoff coming together.
If the numbers move for reasons you can't connect to your work, the query set or the inputs changed. Keep the fields and questions fixed, and the comparison stays honest.
The honest version
A monthly, ten-minute check with a fixed query set will tell you more about your AI presence than a yearly deep dive. Set a reminder, run it, note the changes, and act on the fails. That's the whole system — and it's enough.
At Launch at Dawn we take this off your hands for clients in Montreal and Vancouver, running the fixed-query audit monthly and turning the movement into a fix list. Book a free website teardown and we'll establish your baseline for you.