Maintenance cadence
You can tune periods by category competitiveness, but cover all four layers below—avoid a single push then silence.
| Period | Suggested actions |
|---|---|
| Weekly | Add 1–2 high-frequency industry Q&As; refresh parameters and product comparisons; fix broken links and typos in content shipped this week. |
| Monthly | Batch-update pages with stale data or outdated messaging; fold in new industry reports and market moves; add fresh case studies to core long-form pieces; audit POIs for location drift and duplicate listings. |
| Quarterly | Site-wide content health review: merge scattered shorts into authoritative long-form; remove contradictions and dead claims; align messaging; verify technical markup and brand blurbs. |
| Every 6 months | Compare AI brand mention rate vs competitors and diagnose weight swings; unify terminology and product language site-wide; replace outdated evidence and cases for a full content refresh. |
Biweekly light monitoring (recommended)
Besides content updates, run a light AI check every two weeks: ask core brand questions across major AI assistants and log mention frequency and factual accuracy.
Signal example: if core-question mention rate falls from ~6/10 to ≤2/10, treat it as weight decay—refresh content and retest promptly.
Three principles
Beyond cadence, these determine whether results hold.
1.Results take time—don’t rush
Early shifts often appear in 2–4 weeks; clearer AI citation gains usually take 3–6 months; past 6 months you enter a steadier harvest phase. Competitive categories climb slower—stay consistent rather than thrashing tactics.
2.Stopping maintenance cedes the slot
AI keeps crawling the web and updating evaluation norms. Stale content and lagging data get edged out; faster peers get preferred. Light, regular updates typically outperform neglected content on citation over a half-year horizon.
3.Quality beats volume
Flooding low-quality copy may boost short-term indexing but rarely enters a durable climb for AI traffic. On-and-off publishing stretches the timeline and weakens outcomes—prefer fewer, solid pieces over empty bulk.
This is a general industry reference—use it with workspace todos, monitoring, and fixes. Adjust actions for your category and regions.