How fast do AI answers pick up new pages? Median lag is 9 days
Across 120 newly published pages tracked daily on six engines, median time to first citation was 9 days. Perplexity was fastest at a 3-day median, Google AI Overviews 11 days, and ChatGPT 16 days. Pages linked from an already-cited domain reached first citation 4.2x faster than pages that were not.
- Method
- 120 controlled pages, daily prompt sampling on six engines for 60 days
- Sample
- 43,200 answers
Design
We published 120 pages across 14 cooperating domains, each targeting a low-competition prompt with no incumbent answer. Each prompt was sampled daily for 60 days on six engines. We recorded the first day a page appeared as a citation, plus whether it stayed cited.
Time to first citation
| Engine | Median | 90th percentile | Never cited within 60 days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Perplexity | 3 days | 14 days | 12% |
| Microsoft Copilot | 7 days | 26 days | 21% |
| Google AI Overviews | 11 days | 34 days | 26% |
| Google AI Mode | 12 days | 38 days | 24% |
| ChatGPT | 16 days | 45 days | 31% |
| Baidu ERNIE | 19 days | 52 days | 38% |
What moved the lag
An inbound link from an already-cited domain. Pages with one reached first citation in a median of 4 days versus 17 for pages without. This was the single largest effect in the study.
Being surfaced in classic organic results first. Pages that entered the organic top 20 were cited a median of 6 days later; pages that never ranked were rarely cited at all on the Google surfaces.
Nothing else we tested mattered much. Schema markup, publish-date freshness signals, llms.txt presence and word count all produced effects inside the noise band at this sample size.
Citation is not permanent
Practical guidance
Baseline before publishing, sample daily for the first three weeks and weekly thereafter, and treat anything under two weeks of data as inconclusive on the slower engines.
Evidence
Raw answers, per-cell sample sizes, collection dates and parser versions behind every figure here are available to customers on request. We publish the method so the numbers can be checked rather than taken on faith.
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