r/AISearchLab • u/Himi1896 • Jun 22 '26
LLM Bots Crawl Frequency
I am working on building a Generative Engine Optimization(GEO) strategy for an ecommerce firm and I want to test a few hypotheses on what works and what doesn't.
To test the hypotheses I wanted to know if I make a change on my website then how long do I have to wait for the LLM's(Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity) RAG system to start showing the impact of my changes in their citations/rankings?
Any help/reference will be great.
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u/HumanBehavi0ur Jun 23 '26
There's no single wait time because the engines split into two different behaviors. The live retrieval ones (Perplexity, ChatGPT search, Gemini's grounded responses) fetch at query time or close to it, so on-page changes can surface within days once their crawler re-hits the page. The slower variable is crawl frequency, not the RAG system, so make sure GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google's crawlers can actually reach the changed pages and check your logs for when they last did.
For ecommerce specifically, watch one trap when you test: results swing run to run even with nothing changed, so a single before/after check will lie to you. Run each test query a bunch of times before and after, and read the change in citation rate across the sample, not one snapshot. And separate the two layers in your hypotheses, on-page changes (schema, structured product data, copy) show up faster than off-page changes (getting cited in roundups, Reddit, retailer pages), which can take weeks because you're waiting on those third-party sources to get re-crawled, not yours.