# What a run is

> EOMA puts your questions to four AI engines on a schedule. Here is why the same question is asked over and over, and why one run never proves anything.

Source: https://eoma.ai/docs/concepts/what-a-run-is
Product: EOMA — AI search visibility for brands (https://eoma.ai)
Last updated: 2026-08-14

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## In 10 seconds

- A run is one round of your questions being put to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, and the answers being recorded.
- Paid plans run once a week — four times a month. Not every question goes out in every run.
- These engines do not answer the same question the same way twice, which is exactly why the measurement is repeated rather than taken once.

## The short version

An AI engine is not a database. Ask ChatGPT "what are the best villa rental sites
in Antalya?" three times and you can get three different lists. Nothing broke;
that is how the technology works. It means a single answer tells you almost
nothing, and a single answer treated as a measurement produces a number that
swings for no reason and gets acted on anyway.

EOMA's answer to that is repetition. Your questions go out on a schedule, to
four engines, week after week. Each individual answer is an anecdote. Several
hundred of them, pooled over 28 days, is a measurement — and the same pool
measured again next month is a trend.

That is the whole reason the product accumulates rather than reporting. In your
first fortnight you have a snapshot. By week eight you have a direction, and the
direction is the part that tells you whether the work you did was worth doing.

## How it works

1. **A schedule fires.** On every paid plan, the AI visibility collection runs
   **once a week** — four runs a month, on the same weekday each week. The
   spacing is deliberate: your monthly question allowance is spread across those
   four runs instead of being spent in one enormous tick, so a number always
   reflects several points in time rather than one afternoon.

2. **A quarter of your question set goes out, not all of it.** Each run asks
   your monthly allowance divided by four — so a Starter run puts out about 8
   questions, Growth 25, Scale 50 — and the remainder waits for the next run.
   Four runs, one month, your whole allowance asked exactly once. If you track
   fewer questions than your plan allows, the run is sized on what you actually
   track, never on the plan's ceiling.

3. **Each question is put to four engines.** ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and
   Perplexity, with the same wording, adjusted only where an engine will not
   accept a setting — Gemini takes no location fields, so the location has to sit
   in the question itself; Perplexity accepts a country but not a city. Each
   question is also asked in two modes, one where the engine may search the web
   and one where it answers from what it already knows. That distinction is
   frequently the finding: a brand the engines can *look up* but do not *know* is
   a different problem from one they cannot find at all.

4. **No question is asked twice until every question has been asked once.**
   The rotation picks the questions that have gone longest without being asked,
   so a question you added last week is asked before one asked yesterday. That
   is a guarantee about coverage rather than a waiting period: it is what makes
   "four runs cover your whole set" true rather than approximately true, and it
   is why the rotation cannot get stuck on your five favourite questions.

5. **Answers are added, never replaced.** A question asked in July and again in
   August produces two records under the same question, not one overwritten
   record. That is what makes a per-question history possible, and it is why
   editing a question's wording does not detach it from its own past.

6. **The scoring runs afterwards.** Answers are read for who was named, which
   sources were cited, and whether the engine actually knew anything. Competitor
   names are folded together first — "Airbnb" and "AirBnB" are one rival — and
   only then is anything scored. Scoring before that step would count one
   competitor as two and quietly deflate everything.

## What this means for you

**Not every active question is asked every month, and that is not a fault.**
Your active set is a rotation pool, not a promise. If you add thirty questions
mid-month, some of them will not be reached before the month turns over. Some
may wait several months. There is no error, no warning and no health check for
this, deliberately — a warning that fires constantly and correctly is one
everybody learns to ignore.

**Turning a question off and on again does not push it to the front of the
queue.** The 30-day clock survives deactivation. If you switched a question off
five days after it ran, switching it back on does not buy it an extra send.

**A small active set gets re-asked, not under-spent.** If you narrow to five
questions, those five are asked repeatedly. Your cost does not change; your data
just gets repetitive.

**One run is never evidence, and neither is one day's change.** If your number
moved and you changed nothing, the most likely explanation is that the pool
moved: a run entered the 28-day window and an older one fell out. Compare weeks.

**If nothing has run in 28 days, EOMA says so rather than showing you an old
number.** A blank score with "not measured" is the honest state. Data frozen
weeks behind its schedule is worth reporting to us.

## Common misunderstandings

| People assume | Actually |
|---|---|
| "Every question I have is asked every time." | Each run takes a slice sized by your plan. The whole set is covered across a month of runs, and a question added late may wait. |
| "The answer changed, so the tool is unreliable." | The engines genuinely answer differently between asks. That variance is the reason for repeated measurement, not evidence against it. |
| "A run is a report being generated." | A run is EOMA spending real money asking real engines real questions. It produces new evidence, which is why it is paced rather than run on demand. |
| "I published a fix, so the next run should show it." | The engines re-read the web on their own schedule. Weeks is the normal delay between a change going live and an answer changing. |
| "More runs would give me a better number." | Beyond the current cadence, more runs mostly buy noise. The 28-day pool already holds several runs and well over a hundred answers for an active brand. |

## Related

- [Why your prompts matter](/docs/concepts/why-prompts-matter) — what actually goes out in a run
- [How your visibility is scored](/docs/concepts/how-visibility-is-scored) — what happens to the answers afterwards
- [Plans and limits](/docs/start-here/plans-and-limits) — how many questions your plan sends