The retrieval clock
For a change on your own site to affect an answer, three things have to happen: a crawler has to fetch the page, the page has to be selected by the search step for a relevant question, and the assistant has to prefer it over what it already had. The first of those is the one you can influence, and the crawler documentation from OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity is worth checking if you are unsure whether you are even reachable.
In practice, a new service page on an established site is usually retrievable within one to three weeks. A change on a third-party page depends entirely on that site, and can be immediate or never.
The training clock
Associations formed during training only change when a model is retrained and released. That is why an assistant may still mention a brand name you retired two years ago even after every live source is correct. You cannot accelerate this. You can make the retrieved sources so unambiguous that the assistant prefers them over the stale memory, which is usually enough.
Why re-checking on a fixed schedule matters more than the wait
Assistants vary between runs. If you check once before your change and once after, you cannot tell a real improvement from ordinary variation. Fixed wording, a fixed set of questions, and a fixed cadence is what turns noise into a trend, and it is the entire difference between knowing and guessing.
A realistic timeline
Do not expect anything in the first two weeks and you will not be disappointed. Expect the first movement on job-level questions, not on the generic category question, because those are the ones your new pages can actually win. Expect the generic question to be the last to move, if it moves at all.
Expected windows by change type
What to expect, and when to stop waiting and conclude something is wrong. Log the date you make each change against the row.
| What you changed | Typical first movement | When to conclude it is not working |
|---|---|---|
| New service page on an existing site | 1 to 3 weeks | 6 weeks with no retrieval means a crawlability or thinness problem, not a patience problem. |
| Business Profile category or services | 2 to 6 weeks | 8 weeks. If nothing moved, check for a duplicate profile. |
| Business Profile hours or phone | Days on Google surfaces, weeks in assistants | 6 weeks. A stale third-party copy is usually the holdout. |
| Structured data added | No standalone effect to wait for | Never treat this as a lever on its own. It makes other things clearer. |
| New reviews with specific job language | 3 to 8 weeks | Slow by nature. Judge this on a quarterly rhythm, not weekly. |
| Added to a third-party roundup | 1 to 4 weeks after that page is recrawled | If the roundup itself does not rank, it will never help. Check the page, not the calendar. |
| Business name or brand change | Months | This is the training clock. Keep the old and new names connected on your own site throughout. |
| Blocking or unblocking AI crawlers | Weeks | Verify with your server logs rather than by asking. This one is directly checkable. |
Re-check with identical prompt wording on a fixed day of the month. Changing the wording restarts your baseline and wastes everything you have recorded so far.
You are looking for the term
Crawl and refresh cycle
The delay you are experiencing is the gap between a crawl and a retrieval, and the reason some things never update is that they live in training data rather than in a fetched page. Knowing which of the two you are fighting tells you whether to wait or to change tactics.
- Can I ask an assistant to re-read my site?
- No. There is no refresh request. You can make the page easier to fetch and more worth quoting, and that is the whole of your influence.
- Why did an answer get worse after I made changes?
- Most often ordinary run-to-run variation rather than your change. This is exactly why a fixed prompt set and a fixed cadence matter more than any single reading.
- 01Overview of OpenAI crawlersOpenAI
- 02Google's common crawlersGoogle Search Central
- 03Perplexity crawlersPerplexity
- 04AI features and your websiteGoogle Search Central
Every link above was opened and confirmed reachable on September 1, 2026.
The automated version
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