Quarterly architecture reviews
Every 90 days we step back from incident response and ask whether the @graph design still fits the business as the site has evolved.
What it actually is
Once a quarter we run a deeper review (typically 2 hours) that's intentionally structural, not tactical. We look at the @graph architecture decisions made during the Sprint, what's changed about the business and the site since, and whether the design still holds. Sometimes the answer is yes and we adjust nothing. Sometimes we identify a redesign that needs to happen before the graph fragments.
Marketers don't run architecture reviews because their work isn't architectural. The quarterly review is the moment where the engineering practice steps back from incident response and looks at the system as a whole. It's the difference between maintaining schema and stewarding it.
Deliverables
- Quarterly architecture review session (2 hours)
- Written review document with what's changed and what's recommended
- Updated architecture decision record if any changes are warranted
- Forward-looking flag for any redesign that should be scoped as a Sprint
- Executive read-out variant for stakeholders outside the engineering team (Enterprise tier)
What breaks without it
Sites evolve. New product lines launch, old ones sunset, internationalization gets added, brand acquisitions happen. The @graph design that fit the business in Q1 may not fit in Q4. Without a periodic structural review, the graph quietly drifts out of alignment with the business and citation share starts to soften before anyone connects the dots.
I've watched a brand acquire a sister property and bolt it onto the existing site without revisiting the @graph. Six months later the entity resolution had fragmented because the new property's Organization @id conflicted with the parent. A quarterly review would have caught the problem at month one. Without one, it became a Sprint-scale remediation.
How it fits the Retainer
The quarterly review is the long-cycle counterpart to the monthly pair session. It's where the Retainer most clearly earns its compounding return: small monthly maintenance plus quarterly structural alignment is what keeps a Sprint investment paying out for years instead of decaying in eighteen months.
The full Retainer breakdown
- 01componentSchema regression monitoringOpen
- 02componentAI citation trackingOpen
- 03componentMonthly pair sessionsOpen
- 04componentSlack channel with SLAOpen
- 05currentQuarterly architecture reviewsyou are here
Stop pouring budget into a broken foundation.
If your SEO retainer hasn’t compounded, your AI citations have stalled, or your last technical audit ended in a deck nobody read, that’s not a content problem. It’s an engineering problem. The same engineer who diagnoses ships the fix.