How long does it take AI tools to notice you changed your website?
Honest answer? I don’t know yet, and neither does anyone else with any precision. So I am measuring it on my own site, in public, and this page updates until the answer arrives.
Day 31: the first real answer
On 12 October, thirty one days after the save, ChatGPT stopped quoting the retired prices on all three questions. That is the first number this page has produced. For ChatGPT, on a small site that changes often, letting go of a price took about a month. Perplexity and Google AI Mode never carried the old prices, so there was nothing for them to drop.
Day 54: the engines moved in different directions
On 4 November I asked all three questions again in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, and Gemini.
ChatGPT now names GeoVize first on every question. It has also picked up a new stale price. On 12 October at 12:10 in the afternoon I took the exact prices off my Services page, including the one for a Business Profile cleanup. Twenty three days later, ChatGPT is still quoting that figure on two of the three questions. So this page now has a second clock running, started from that save.
Google AI Mode went the other way. In October it named GeoVize first on the first question. Today it doesn’t name the business on any of them. Perplexity and Gemini still don’t name it at all.
Being named once is not the same as staying named. The research further down explains why these answers drift even when nothing on your site changes.
What changed, and exactly when
On 11 September 2026, at 2:04 in the afternoon, I retired two priced offers. A $250 Visibility Snapshot and a $600 AI Visibility Audit. I removed every reference to both from my website in that one edit, including the copy on the page, the pricing in the FAQ, and the offers inside the structured data. The timestamp is not an estimate. It is the save on the page revision.
The copy as it stood before the edit, recovered from the page revision history. All of it came off the live site in a single save.
That gives a clean starting point, which is the part usually missing from this question. I know the exact hour the source changed, I control the page, and I can keep asking.
What the engines said afterwards
The next day, 12 September, I asked ChatGPT who does AI search visibility work for small businesses near Brunswick, Georgia. Roughly twenty four hours after the prices had gone.
It recommended my business, described the offering accurately, and quoted both retired prices. With a link to the page they had been deleted from the day before.
Perplexity and Google AI Mode had nothing stale to report, for a less flattering reason. Neither had the pricing because neither had the business.
Why this happens
Three separate delays get talked about as though they were one.
- Crawl. When a bot fetches your page again. This can happen within days, or not for months, depending on how often your site changes and how much attention it gets.
- Index. When that fetch actually replaces what was stored. A page can be crawled and the stored version can stay behind it.
- Answer. When a model uses the new version in a reply rather than something it learned earlier or is holding in cache. This is the one that shows up in front of your customers, and it is the slowest.
A change can be crawled and indexed and still not appear in answers. Which is why the honest answer to how long this takes is that it depends on which of the three you mean.
What the bigger studies show
My log is one small site and one kind of change. Here is what larger research says, engine by engine.
Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google’s own guidance says a page that can show in regular search with a snippet can also be used as a source for its AI features. There is no separate route in. It rides on the normal Google index, so the clock is Google’s crawl, and Google says recrawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. Once Google has the page, it can move quickly. In a Semrush test of 81 new pages tracked for 30 days, AI Mode cited 29 of them within 24 hours, although those citations came and went more over the month.
ChatGPT. ChatGPT only searches the web when it decides a question needs fresh information. Otherwise it answers from what the model learned in training. When it does search, it pulls from a Bing style index plus OpenAI’s own crawl, and OpenAI hasn’t published the mix. That second source is growing fast. A Botify and Nectiv analysis of roughly 7 billion log files found OpenAI’s crawling tripled after August 2025. This split is likely why ChatGPT held onto my old prices for a month while the other engines never had them at all.
Perplexity. Perplexity keeps its own index, built by PerplexityBot, and it can also fetch a page on the spot when someone asks a question. That live fetch is why it is often the quickest to reflect a change, as long as it knows your business exists in the first place.
Nobody publishes a schedule. None of these companies publishes a crawl frequency policy or any guarantee on when the next visit happens. Every timeline you read, mine included, is a measurement and not a promise.
Answers move even when you don’t. SISTRIX tracked 82,619 prompts over 17 weeks and found that for 53% of them, not a single AI Overview source changed the entire time. ChatGPT search was the opposite, with 74% of the domains it cited being new every week. If ChatGPT says something different about you from one week to the next, it isn’t necessarily reacting to anything you did.
How to shorten the wait
You can’t force an AI tool to update, but you can remove the reasons it is slow.
Ask Google to recrawl. In Search Console, run the URL through URL Inspection and click Request Indexing. That one step covers AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini’s web answers.
Tell Bing directly. Submit the URL in Bing Webmaster Tools or turn on IndexNow, which most SEO plugins now support. IndexNow speeds up Bing, and Copilot and part of ChatGPT’s search results are built on Bing. Google doesn’t use IndexNow, so do both.
Make the change obvious. Update the modified date in your structured data and sitemap so crawlers can see the page actually changed, and link to it from your homepage for a while so it gets visited sooner.
Don’t block the search crawlers. Check your robots.txt for OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. Allowing OAI-SearchBot doesn’t give OpenAI permission to train on your content. It only lets your pages appear in ChatGPT search.
Fix it everywhere, not just on your site. If the wrong detail also lives on your Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, or an old directory listing, the engines can keep finding it there long after your own page is right.
The log
Every check is by hand, in the live tools, asking the questions a customer would ask. This table grows until the old prices are gone from every engine.
The three questions, asked word for word the same way each time.
- Q1. Who does AI search visibility work for small businesses near Brunswick, Georgia?
- Q2. Who can help a Brunswick business get found by ChatGPT?
- Q3. Who should a Brunswick, Georgia business hire to get recommended by AI search tools? Added 14 September.
| Date | Engine | Question | Old price still shown? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 Sep 2026, 2:04 pm | Source | — | Both prices removed from the site in a single save. Copy, FAQ, and structured data. |
| 12 Sep 2026 | ChatGPT | Q1, Q2 | Yes. Still quoting $250 and $600, with a link to the page they had been removed from the previous day. |
| 12 Sep 2026 | Perplexity | Q1, Q2 | No. Never had the pricing. Named me personally through an Upwork listing and not the business. |
| 12 Sep 2026 | Google AI Mode | Q1, Q2 | No. Did not name the business at all, so there was nothing stale to carry. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | ChatGPT | Q1 | Yes. Still quoting both, three days after removal, citing the page they came off. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | ChatGPT | Q2 | No. Did not name the business at all on this question. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | ChatGPT | Q3 | Yes. Quoted the $600 audit. The $250 snapshot did not appear. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Perplexity | Q1, Q2 | No. Still no pricing, and no longer names me at all. |
| 14 Sep 2026 | Google AI Mode | Q1, Q2, Q3 | No. Still does not name the business. |
| 12 Oct 2026 | ChatGPT | Q1 | No. The retired offers are gone. Names GeoVize first, and quotes the prices that were still on the site that morning. |
| 12 Oct 2026 | ChatGPT | Q2 | No pricing shown. Names GeoVize first. On 14 September it did not name the business on this question at all. |
| 12 Oct 2026 | ChatGPT | Q3 | No. Names GeoVize first. |
| 12 Oct 2026 | Google AI Mode | Q1 | Names GeoVize first, the first time it has named the business on any question. |
| 12 Oct 2026 | Google AI Mode | Q2, Q3 | Does not name the business. |
| 12 Oct 2026 | Perplexity | Q1 | Does not name the business. Q2 and Q3 not run, because Perplexity required a sign-in after one question. |
| 12 Oct 2026 | Gemini | Q1, Q2, Q3 | Does not name the business. First check in the Gemini app. |
| 12 Oct 2026, 12:10 pm | Source | n/a | Exact prices removed from the Services page, including the Business Profile cleanup price. Starts a second clock. |
| 4 Nov 2026 | ChatGPT | Q1 | No sign of the September prices. Names GeoVize first, but quotes the Business Profile cleanup price retired on 12 October. |
| 4 Nov 2026 | ChatGPT | Q2 | No pricing shown. Names GeoVize first and recommends starting there. |
| 4 Nov 2026 | ChatGPT | Q3 | Names GeoVize first and again quotes the price retired on 12 October. |
| 4 Nov 2026 | Google AI Mode | Q1 | Does not name the business. On 12 October it named GeoVize first on this question. |
| 4 Nov 2026 | Google AI Mode | Q2, Q3 | Does not name the business. |
| 4 Nov 2026 | Perplexity | Q1 | Does not name the business. Says it found no provider based near Brunswick. |
| 4 Nov 2026 | Perplexity | Q2, Q3 | Names no provider at all, only general advice. |
| 4 Nov 2026 | Gemini | Q1, Q3 | Does not name the business. Names a Brunswick SEO firm instead. |
| 4 Nov 2026 | Gemini | Q2 | Names no provider, only general advice. |
Checked by hand every few weeks now. Elapsed time is measured from the 11 September save, and from 12 October for the second price.
What this means for your business
Fix the page anyway. Nothing downstream updates if the source never changes, and every day you wait is added to the front of the delay.
Then expect a gap. Assume anything you publish today arrives late, and that anything you removed today is still out there being quoted.
And if there is a wrong price, an old phone number, or a service you no longer offer sitting inside an AI answer about your business right now, the clock starts when you fix the page, not when you notice the problem.
Common questions
How long does it take AI tools to notice you changed your website?
There is no published schedule, and it depends on whether you mean the crawl or the answer a customer actually sees. On this site, ChatGPT took about a month to stop quoting two removed prices. Google’s AI features can reflect a change within days of Google recrawling the page, and Perplexity can fetch a page live when someone asks.
Why does ChatGPT show old information about my business?
Because it can answer from a stored copy of your page or from what it learned earlier, rather than from your page as it stands today. Removing something from your site doesn’t pull it out of an answer straight away. Here, ChatGPT quoted two removed prices the day after they came off, and weeks later it was quoting a different price that had been retired on 12 October.
What is the difference between crawling, indexing, and appearing in an AI answer?
Crawling is a bot fetching your page again. Indexing is that fetch replacing the stored version. Appearing in an answer is a model actually using the new version in a reply. A page can be crawled and indexed and still show up wrong in answers, which is why a fix can look live to you and stale to a customer.
What should I do if AI answers contain wrong prices or an old phone number for my business?
Correct the source first, on your website, in your structured data, and on your Business Profile and directory listings. Then request a recrawl in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and expect a delay, because the clock starts when the page is fixed rather than when you notice the problem.
Most people find out about this the hard way, when a customer quotes something back at them that has not been true for a year. The free check below is how to find out the easy way.