How often should I re-test my AEO citation footprint?

Weekly for high-volatility queries, monthly for the long tail. AI engines update their indices and behavior continuously — ChatGPT Search re-crawls news and high-velocity topics daily, Perplexity refreshes its index multiple times per week, and Google AI Overviews updates with the underlying Google Search index. Citation share can swing 20–40 percentage points week-over-week on competitive queries, especially after a model update or a competitor's content push.

A defensible AEO testing cadence: (1) Daily — automated checks on your top 5–10 brand-critical prompts (your brand name, your category's #1 query, your top three product queries). (2) Weekly — full sweep of 100–300 priority prompts across all monitored engines (ChatGPT, ChatGPT Search, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot). (3) Monthly — long-tail audit of 1,000+ prompts including comparison, "best of," and adjacent-intent queries. (4) After every model launch — re-baseline within 48 hours when OpenAI ships GPT-5, Anthropic ships a new Claude generation, or Google updates AI Overviews ranking.

Manual testing breaks down past 50 prompts because the time cost compounds and human consistency degrades. Dedicated platforms (Surfaced, Peec.ai, Profound) run thousands of prompts daily with consistent normalization, store historical share data, and alert on share drops. The economic question isn't "should I automate?" — it's whether the tool's price is below the labor cost of the manual equivalent, which it almost always is past 100 prompts.