How often prompts run
Every monitor runs its prompts on a schedule against its selected models. The default, and what every standard plan uses, is daily. Trial accounts also run daily. Organizations with the custom frequency feature enabled can set an individual monitor to a slower cadence: every other day, weekly, or monthly, which trades freshness for a lower response spend on prompts that don’t need daily tracking. Slower cadences anchor to the monitor’s start date: a weekly monitor runs on the same weekday it started, a monthly one on the same day of month. Days between runs produce no new responses for that monitor, which is worth remembering before reading an empty day as a problem. Some events are fast-tracked. When you create a monitor, add a prompt, reactivate a monitor, or change a monitor’s models, that run skips the cadence wait and jumps the bulk backlog, so a new setup typically starts producing data the same day. See what is a monitor.What happens between a run and your charts
Each scheduled run goes through three stages:- Scheduling: on a monitor’s run day, its prompt-model pairs are queued. Days follow UTC, so if you’re well east or west of UTC, “today” in the app starts and ends at a different hour than your local midnight.
- Collection: prompts are asked on the actual AI platforms the way a real user would ask them, and this is dispatched in batches through the day rather than in one burst. Responses trickle in across hours. See how Promptwatch collects data.
- Analysis: every completed response is analyzed to extract mentions, sentiment, and visibility. Analysis runs continuously, picking up new responses within minutes of completion, but a response only counts in mention and visibility metrics after this step finishes.
Why “today” can look empty
The most common freshness question is a today view that looks thin next to yesterday, and it’s almost always one of these:- The day isn’t done: with collection spread across the UTC day, a morning look catches a fraction of the day’s responses. Yesterday is complete; today is in progress. Compare complete days.
- Analysis is trailing collection: charts only include analyzed responses, so mention and visibility numbers stay empty until that step finishes, even after collection has already completed.
- It’s not a run day: a monitor on a weekly or monthly cadence produces nothing between runs, by design.
- A model is mid-cycle: models within the same run finish at different times, so per-model views firm up at different hours. See no data for a model.
