Scan Frequency
Scan Frequency is how often an AI visibility monitoring tool re-checks a tracked prompt against the monitored AI models, for example daily, every 2 days, weekly, or every 14 days. It determines both how fresh the visibility data is and how much of the plan's scan budget the prompt consumes.
Definition
Frequency is a trade-off between freshness and coverage. Daily scans catch visibility shifts within a day, which matters for branded prompts, competitive comparisons, and prompts tied to active campaigns. Weekly or 14-day scans still reveal trends and ranking changes on long-tail prompts while consuming a fraction of the scans, freeing budget to track many more prompts.
In practice, frequency is set hierarchically: a default at the website level, overrides per topic, and overrides per individual prompt, with lower levels inheriting from the level above. A common allocation scans buying-intent prompts daily, competitor prompts every 2 days, and long-tail informational prompts weekly.
Why it matters for AI visibility
Most AI answers change slowly, so scanning every prompt daily wastes budget on data that rarely moves. Matching frequency to how fast each prompt actually changes lets a team track several times more prompts on the same plan, and long-tail coverage is where unexpected competitor mentions and new citation opportunities usually surface first.
Related terms
Scan Budget
A Scan Budget is the monthly allowance of prompt checks included in an AI visibility monitoring plan, where one scan checks one tracked prompt across the monitored AI models. Instead of a fixed cap on how many prompts can be tracked, the budget is spent according to the scan frequency assigned to each prompt.
GEOTracked Prompts
Tracked Prompts are a predefined, consistent set of queries monitored over time to measure AI visibility trends, brand mentions, citations, and competitive positioning within LLM responses.
GEOPrompt Monitoring
Prompt Monitoring is the systematic tracking of AI-generated responses to a predefined set of queries or prompts, measuring how your brand and content appear within those generated answers over time.
GEOAI Visibility Score
AI Visibility Score is a quantified measurement of how frequently and prominently a brand, domain, or entity appears within AI-generated responses across tracked prompts and platforms.