The short answer
Check your AI citations on a regular schedule rather than ad hoc, because AI answers vary between runs and engines, so a single check is a snapshot, not a trend. For most teams a weekly pass over a stable prompt set across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews is a good baseline: frequent enough to catch movement, not so frequent that normal run-to-run variance looks like a real change. Check more often right after you ship content changes or during a competitive push.
Weekly is a sensible baseline
Citations move more slowly than classic rankings, so a weekly pass usually captures real change without drowning you in noise. The important part is consistency: same prompt set, same engines, same day of the week. That holds the variables steady so a shift in citation rate or share of model reflects something real rather than the engines simply answering differently that day.
When to check more often
Step up to daily checks when you have just published or revised content and want to see whether it landed, or when a competitor is clearly pushing in your category and you need an early read. Rank tracking is worth running daily regardless, since link positions move faster than AI citations and the two together tell a fuller story.
Let it run automatically
Manual checks are easy to skip, and a skipped week breaks the trend. Scheduling the run and sending yourself a report keeps the cadence honest without relying on memory.
AI citation tracking runs your prompt set on a schedule and reports the trend, and the citation tracking methodology explains how the numbers are built. To get your first data point now, run the free AI visibility scan.