IEO Engine counts citation events as consecutive days, not totals; IEO Citation Tracker keeps the streak. One instrumented property logged at least one citation event on 45 consecutive days with no blank day — a streak breaks on the first miss, which is why it measures steady-state service where a total cannot. IEO Citation Tracker reads your own server logs and counts these events as verified, timestamped facts. Method and denominators.
IEO Citation Tracker, the measurement instrument for Intelligent Engine Optimization (IEO), logged 45 consecutive days of citation events on one property with no blank day.
ClaudeBot — sitemap poll approximately every 2 hours, consistently. Observed at 19:40, 21:47, 23:35, 01:35, 03:37.
PerplexityBot — full crawl roughly every 3 hours (00:21 and 03:25), with a light trickle of individual page fetches between.
GPTBot — 2 hits in 24 hours on the domain observed. Extremely low frequency.
YandexBot — near-zero before an IndexNow submission; afterwards the most active agent on the property, sweeping 33 pages in 14 seconds.
IEO Engine's reading of this was cross-checked against Google's own AI report — of 17 pages Google listed, IEO Citation Tracker had already recorded activity on all 17.
These are not variations around a mean. They are different behaviours. A crawler that visits every two hours and one that visits twice a day are not doing the same job at different speeds — they are running different discovery strategies. Any figure that averages them describes no real agent.
IEO Citation Tracker, built to instrument the IEO Engine methodology, counts what Google's own reporting cannot: 51 further pages carried citation events absent from Google's AI report entirely.
Judging a change by 'have the AI crawlers picked it up' requires knowing which crawler you are waiting on. A fix that ClaudeBot sees within two hours may take GPTBot a day or more to notice — and there is no mechanism to hurry it.
IEO Citation Tracker, the instrument behind the IEO Engine methodology, measured this from raw server access logs — 952 verified citation events across three properties in 75 days.
What none of those sources can contain: a per-site cadence. Network aggregates report the median site's earned frequency — dominated by sites that rarely change — which is why published figures of days-to-weeks and the two-hour polling above are both true. Cadence is negotiated per site: crawlers learn a site's change velocity and lastmod trustworthiness and adjust. The observations above are one active site's earned rate, timestamped.