Cron expression examples: a cheat sheet for scheduled SEO jobs
Common crontab schedules with plain-English meanings, matched to sitemap, crawl and reporting jobs, plus a free way to check each one.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom, Editorial team··3 min read
Here are the cron expression examples you will use most, each with what it means in plain English. Copy the one closest to your job, then paste it into the free AyeTab Cron Parser to confirm the wording and the next run times before you save it.
SEO work runs on schedules more than people admit: sitemap rebuilds, rank checks, log exports, crawl audits, cache warmers after a deploy. Most of them live in a crontab or in a platform that borrows its syntax, so knowing a handful of patterns saves a lot of guessing.
The cheat sheet
| Schedule | Expression | Typical SEO job |
|---|---|---|
| Every 15 minutes | */15 * * * * |
Uptime or status code check on key pages |
| Every hour, on the hour | 0 * * * * |
Pull fresh Search Console or analytics data into a sheet |
| Every 6 hours | 0 */6 * * * |
Re-crawl a small set of priority URLs |
| Every day at 03:00 | 0 3 * * * |
Rebuild and ping the XML sitemap |
| Every weekday at 08:30 | 30 8 * * 1-5 |
Send the morning rank report |
| Every Monday at 06:00 | 0 6 * * 1 |
Weekly crawl audit before the team starts |
| First day of the month at 00:00 | 0 0 1 * * |
Monthly content inventory export |
| Twice a day, 09:00 and 21:00 | 0 9,21 * * * |
Check robots.txt and llms.txt for unexpected changes |
Every line has five fields: minute, hour, day of month, month and day of week. A comma makes a list, a hyphen makes a range, and a slash makes a step. Day of week runs 0 to 7, where both 0 and 7 mean Sunday.
Shortcuts some cron versions accept
Many Linux cron daemons accept nicknames in place of the five fields. The crontab manual lists @hourly, @daily, @weekly, @monthly, @yearly and @reboot. They are easy to read, but they all fire at minute zero, which is exactly when everyone else's jobs fire too. For a crawl that hits a shared server, a spelled-out time like 17 3 * * * is kinder.
How to read an example you found online
Forum answers mix formats. Before you paste one in, check three things:
- Count the fields. Five means classic cron. Six or seven usually means Quartz, which adds seconds at the front and sometimes a year at the end.
- Look for
?,Lor#. Those are Quartz and similar schedulers, not standard crontab. - Run it through a parser. AyeTab turns the expression into a sentence such as "At 03:00 AM" and lists when it will fire next. If the sentence surprises you, the expression is wrong.
The parser runs inside the browser, so the schedule never leaves your machine, and there is nothing to sign up for. AyeTab also offers the same tool as a Chrome extension that lives on your new tab, next to its other developer tools.
One trap worth knowing
When both the day-of-month and day-of-week fields are restricted, cron runs the job if either one matches, not only when both do. 0 9 1 * 1 fires on the first of the month and on every Monday. The crontab.guru tips page covers this rule in detail, and it is the single most common reason a "monthly" report shows up weekly.
Where crontab.guru fits
Crontab.guru, from the makers of Cronitor, has a large examples page sorted by phrase, such as "every weekday" or "every quarter", and it is a fine place to browse. When you already have an expression and want to know what it does, the AyeTab parser is the quicker check, and it keeps your input local.