A visibility scan sends your tracked prompts to your selected AI models and records how each one answers.
What a scan measures
For each prompt and model, Citera records:
Whether your brand was mentioned, and your position in the answer
The sentiment of how you were described (positive, neutral or negative)
Which competitors appeared
Which sources (domains and pages) the answer cited
These roll up into metrics such as share of voice, mention rate, citations and competitor gaps.
How often do scans run?
Automatic scan frequency depends on your plan:
Starter: weekly (about 4 per month)
Scale: every other day (about 15 per month)
Custom: daily (about 30 per month)
Analytics are refreshed on a daily run, so new mentions, citations and ranking changes appear after the next refresh.
Manual scans
You can run an extra scan from New Scan, for example after publishing an important page. Manual scans count toward your plan allowance, which resets at the start of each period.
Reading scan results well
Look at trends, not single readings. AI answers vary from run to run. A result seen across many scans is a finding; a result from two scans may be noise.
Check the Total scans and Last seen columns in Competitors to understand how much evidence there is and how fresh a row is.
Keep your prompt set stable when comparing periods. If you add or remove prompts, note it.
Models disagree. Being strong in one model and absent in another is normal and shows you where to focus.