November 6, 2026

A Complete Guide to AEOTrack Automation: Scheduled Checks & Score Alerts

Introduction

Maintaining a competitive AI search presence requires continuous monitoring. Rather than manually running checks every time you publish new content or update your site structure, AEOTrack re-checks your tracked questions and topics on a schedule and tells you when a score really moves.

The Automation page (Settings → Automation in the sidebar) has two tabs: Scheduled checks and Alerts. Both are per website: pick the website in the header first.

This guide walks through every scheduling control, alert rule and step-by-step workflow on the page, using a fictional example company: Acme Coffee Roasters (acmecoffee.example).

What Is the Automation Page?

The Automation page does two things:

Scheduled checks: re-asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok your tracked questions and topics on a cadence — weekly for everything, plus a small daily set of your pinned questions.
Alerts: a Slack or email message when your Questions score or Topics score moves by at least a threshold you choose and the move falls outside the range to expect between two checks. Microsoft Teams receives the same real drops through its card on the Integrations page.

It helps you answer core questions:

How do I set up automated weekly checks of my questions and topics?
Which questions get checked daily, and why does the daily set pause?
How do I connect Slack or email to get notified of major score changes?
What threshold should I set for score alerts?

Configuring Scheduled Checks

Two schedules are created for every website when you add it, so there is normally something already running: Questions + topics, which re-checks everything you track, and a weekly Improvement Plan, which re-audits the site for the plan's tasks. The Scheduled checks tab is where you add, pause and change schedules.

Adding a New Schedule

Select what to check: Questions + topics, Questions only or Topics only.
Select the frequency: Weekly or Daily. Weekly is on every plan. Daily is offered when your plan has a daily set (see below); choosing it switches the scope to Questions only, because the daily set covers questions only.
Click Add schedule to save and activate it.

The two cadences

	Weekly	Daily
What runs	Every tracked question and topic on the schedule's scope, up to your plan's ceilings	Your pinned questions only — 3 on Starter, 10 on Pro, 25 on Agency, every question on Enterprise (fair use). On the trial, every question and topic is checked daily while you use it
Plans	Every plan	Every paid plan, and the trial
Pauses?	Never on a paid plan	Pauses after 14 days without a sign-in on a paid plan and resumes on your next visit
Counts against re-checks?	No	No

The daily set exists so you see day-to-day movement on the questions that matter without paying for a full daily run. You choose it by pinning questions; see Pin your most important questions. With nothing pinned, the daily set is the earliest-added questions. Topics and the Improvement Plan always run weekly.

Managing Existing Schedules

Each schedule appears in the list with:

What it checks: Questions, Topics, Questions + topics or Improvement Plan.
Last run: when the check last executed (for example 29 Sep 2026, 03:56 GMT+05:30), shown in your timezone.
Frequency: a Weekly / Daily selector you can change in place — switching to daily re-runs at the next poll.
Active / Paused badge and a Pause / Resume button.
Delete (trash icon): removes the schedule; your questions, topics and history stay.

Example (fictional): Acme Coffee Roasters has two active weekly schedules: Questions + topics, last run 29 Sep 2026, 03:56 GMT+05:30, and Improvement Plan, last run 28 Sep 2026, 05:56 GMT+05:30.

Scheduled runs never count against your on-demand re-check pool. If a run is deferred because the platform's daily AI budget is spent, the schedule shows the reason and runs on the next poll.

After a scheduled weekly run on a paid plan, the weekly results email lists what moved against the ± range. It is sent only when something moved: a question started or stopped naming you, or the score cleared its range. A week where nothing moved sends no email. The Monday digest follows the same rule and is skipped in a week that already had a weekly results email. The full schedule is in The emails AEOTrack sends and when.

Setting Up Alerts

The Alerts tab holds the rules that message you when a score moves. Every new website gets a 5-point email alert to the account owner automatically, so you hear about a real move even if you never open this tab. For Acme Coffee Roasters that default rule sends to maya@acmecoffee.example at "Changes ≥ 5 pts" and last triggered on 18 Sep 2026.

Adding an alert

Choose the channel: Slack or Email.
Enter the destination: a Slack incoming webhook URL (see the Slack integration guide) or an email address — leave the email blank to use the account owner's address.
Set the threshold in points (1–100; the form suggests 10).
Click Add alert.

Each rule shows when it last triggered and has Test (sends a test message to that destination), Pause / Resume and Delete. An email address that has unsubscribed from AEOTrack mail is flagged and will not receive alerts until it re-subscribes.

How alerts decide to fire

Once a day, against yesterday. Rules are evaluated daily, at a fixed hour in the owner's timezone, comparing today's score with yesterday's. A move that arrives as several small checks in one sitting is judged as one move, not as several increments that each miss the threshold.
Threshold and range together. A rule fires when the move is at least the threshold and the new score's range no longer overlaps the old one. A 6-point move inside a ±10 range is sampling noise and stays silent; a 6-point move that clears the range is real. See What the ± on a score means.
Direction depends on the channel. Email rules fire on drops and improvements — the subject says which. Slack rules fire on drops only, so a shared channel never fills with good news that gets it muted.
Dark engines never trigger an alert. If either day's score was computed while engines were failing, the difference is the missing engines, not your visibility, and the comparison is skipped.
No drop alerts in the first 48 hours. For 48 hours after your account's first check, no drop is reported anywhere: no drop email, no bell notification and no post to a connection. The first days' numbers settle as the first checks come in. Rises are reported as usual.
In-app notification. Independently of any rule, a real drop of 5 points or more after a check creates a notification in the bell menu and is also posted to any Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zapier or custom webhook connection on the Integrations page.
Email alerts count towards the email limit. AEOTrack sends any one person at most one automatic email a day and three in any seven days. An email alert that would go over that is skipped for the day; the move is still on the Dashboard, and Slack and Teams posts are not affected.

Alerts are part of the automation capability, which every paid plan and the trial includes; an expired account sends nothing.

Screenshot of the AEOTrack Automation settings page showing scheduled check controls, active schedule list, and Slack/Email alert settings. The AEOTrack Automation page, with scheduled check creation, the active schedule list and Slack/email alert rules.

Step-by-Step Automation Workflow

Navigate to Settings → Automation from your sidebar and pick the website.
Check the weekly schedule created with the website; add a Daily schedule for your questions if your plan has a daily set and you want day-to-day movement on your most important questions.
Obtain a Slack incoming webhook URL from your Slack workspace.
Add an alert — paste the Slack webhook URL, set a threshold of 10 points, and click Add alert. Add an email rule too if you want to hear about improvements.
Verify — confirm the schedules show Active and click Test on the alert to check delivery.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will scheduled checks consume my on-demand re-checks? No. Scheduled runs are the product's own cadence and never count against the monthly re-check pool; only Recheck buttons and API-triggered checks do.

My daily schedule stopped running. Why? On a paid plan the daily set pauses after 14 days without anyone on the account signing in, and resumes on the next visit. The weekly schedule never pauses on a paid plan. A daily schedule kept through a downgrade to a plan without a daily set simply runs weekly.

What happens if a scheduled check is paused? AEOTrack stops re-checking on that schedule. Your history, tracked questions and settings stay untouched until you click Resume.

Does anything run after my trial ends? No. Every check stops when the trial ends, and nothing runs on a read-only account. Your schedules are kept, switched off, and start running again from where they stopped when you pick a plan. The trial is not extended; see When your trial ends.

Can I send Slack alerts to multiple channels? Yes. Add one Slack rule per webhook URL, each with its own threshold (for example #seo-alerts at 5 points and #marketing-team at 15).

Why did a 7-point move not trigger my 5-point alert? Because its range overlapped the previous one: the move was inside the range to expect between two checks. The trend chart shades the range; a move that stays inside the shading is not treated as real.

Conclusion

AEOTrack Automation ensures your team is always informed when AI engines change how they talk about your brand. Weekly checks keep the picture current, the daily set watches the questions that matter most, and alerts speak only when a move is real.