Guidelines for full-text index maintenance

What guidelines should be considered for maintaining full-text indexes? Should I REBUILD or REORGANIZE the full-text catalog (see BOL )? What is a reasonable maintenance cadence? What heuristics (similar to the 10% and 30% fragmentation thresholds) could be used to determine when maintenance is needed? (Everything below is simply extra information elaborating on the question and showing what I've thought about so far.)

**Extra info: my initial research** There are a lot of resources on b-tree index maintenance (e.g., this question , Ola Hallengren's scripts , and numerous blog posts on the subject from other sites). However, I have found that none of these resources provide recommendations or scripts for maintaining fulltext indexes. There is Microsoft documentation that mentions that defragmenting the b-tree index of the base table and then performing a REORGANIZE on the full-text catalog may improve performance, but it doesn't touch on any more specific recommendations. I also found this question , but it is primarily focused on change-tracking (how data updates to the underlying table are propagated into the fulltext index) and not the type of regularly scheduled maintenance that could maximize the efficiency of the index. **Extra info: basic performance testing** This SQL Fiddle contains code that can be used to create a full-text index with AUTO change tracking and examine both the size and query performance of the index as data in the table is modified. When I run the script's logic on a copy of my production data (as opposed to the artificially manufactured data in the fiddle), here is a summary of the results I am seeing after each data modification step: Even though the update statements in this script were fairly contrived, this data seems to show that there is a lot to be gained by regular maintenance. **Extra info: Initial ideas** I'm thinking about creating a nightly or weekly task. It seems that this task could perform either a REBUILD or REORGANIZE. Because the full-text indexes may be quite large (tens or hundreds of millions of rows), I'd like to be able to detect when indexes within the catalog are sufficiently fragmented that a REBUILD/REORGANIZE is warranted. I'm a little bit unclear on what heuristics might make sense for that.