Costs and cadence

AI visibility is the one part of Audience you spend against on a schedule, so this page is deliberately plain about what runs on its own, what only runs when you press a button, and what happens when the budget runs out.

Every morning#

Once a panel is confirmed, Scout asks every question on it each morning, of every assistant it can reach. The Questions tab says as much before the first run: Scout is tracking your questions and asks them every morning, and the first answers land tomorrow. If you would rather not wait, Run the panel now asks them today.

Daily rather than weekly is a deliberate choice. A single reading carries real variance, because answer engines do not repeat themselves exactly. Four readings a month cannot separate a genuine change in your visibility from the assistant phrasing itself differently; thirty can. This is why the Overview draws a weekly trend once two weeks of readings exist, and why every single result carries the "one sample" caveat.

An assistant that cannot be reached on a given morning is skipped with a note rather than failing the run, and its tile on the Overview keeps the last good reading.

The budget#

Every workspace has a monthly AI budget with a ceiling. The prompt panel page shows it as a line above the questions: how much of the ceiling has been spent so far. Near the ceiling the line turns amber and adds a sentence you should read as a promise: the panel stops asking once the ceiling is reached, and reports the shorter sample it took rather than counting the unasked questions as misses.

That last part matters. A budget that quietly turned the unasked half of your panel into "Absent" would make your visibility look worse the less you spent. Audience never does that. When the ceiling stops a run, the Runs figure and each question's sample count reflect what was actually asked, and the rest wait for next month.

The size of a panel is the main lever on cost: fifty questions a day costs more than twelve. The panel cap of 50 questions, and the fact that only confirmed questions are asked, are there to keep the spend proportional to what you chose to measure. Budgets and limits describes the wider budget the panel draws from.

What only runs when you ask#

Nothing on the AI visibility section spends money on arrival. Each of these is a button:

• Suggest questions, which drafts a panel from your company profile.
• Run now on the panel, and Run the panel now on the Questions tab.
• Asking one assistant again from its tile on the Overview.
• Measure it now on the Market tab, which pays a third party for the wider-market estimate.
• Research this and its variants, which start research on a question you lost.

Reading the report is free. Opening any tab, expanding an answer, filtering questions, and reading the sources cost nothing.

Who can change it#

Configuring and running the panel, and measuring the market, is for owners and admins. Editors and viewers can read every screen and, if they are editors, send a lost question to research. See Who does what.