Audit rate limit
One audit per brand per hour.
Last updated: 2026-05-05
Audit rate limit
The AI Search Audit is rate-limited to one run per account per hour. This page explains why, what the limit covers, and how to plan around it.
Why the limit exists
Each audit performs a multi-page crawl, two fetches per page (Google and Bing user agents) via Firecrawl, content parsing, schema extraction, and scoring. A typical run takes 30–90 seconds and consumes meaningful third-party API budget. Allowing unlimited re-runs would:
- Saturate Firecrawl quotas, slowing other users' audits
- Encourage micro-tweaking that doesn't actually change the score
- Mask real-world propagation delays (CDN caches, search-engine re-indexing) that take longer than an hour
The 1/hr limit is a deliberate guardrail to ensure each audit reflects a meaningfully different state.
What counts toward the limit
- One full audit run per domain per account per hour.
- Failed runs (timeouts, fetch errors) do not consume the quota — you can retry immediately.
- Auditing a different domain on the same account still counts toward the same per-account hourly limit.
What doesn't count
- Re-loading a previous audit's results.
- Exporting a past audit as PDF.
- Reading the Top Fixes panel.
What counts toward the limit
| Action | Counts toward the hourly limit? |
|---|---|
| A completed audit run | Yes |
| A failed run (timeout or fetch error) | No — retry immediately |
| Auditing a different domain on the same account | Yes — the limit is per account |
| Re-loading a previous audit's results | No |
| Exporting a past audit as PDF | No |
| Reading the Top Fixes panel | No |
Planning around it
- Bundle fixes. Don't audit after every single change; ship a batch of fixes (robots.txt, schema, llms.txt) and audit once.
- Wait for propagation. After deploying a fix, give your CDN and any caching layer at least the full hour to flush before re-auditing.
- Use the per-pillar score to prioritise — if Discoverability is the bottleneck, fixing schema first won't move the needle until robots is fixed.
Hitting the limit
If you try to run a second audit within the hour, the UI shows the time remaining until the next run is available. The button is disabled, not hidden, so you always see when you can re-run.
Related articles
- AI Search Audit (GEO Audit)
- Top Fixes per pillar
- Which pages does the audit crawl?