There were two different kinds of Olympiad chronicle. One kind listed winners in all events, the other only stadion victors. In both cases the text of the chronicle was organized around a framework of numbered Olympiads. Individual years within Olympiads were identified either by ordinal numbers or by Athenian archons or Roman consuls. Historical notices, of variable length and detail, were attached to the entry for each Olympiad.

The victor catalogs in Olympiad chronicles typically began with Olympiad 1 and ran down to the time they were compiled. The starting points of the historical accounts in six Olympiad chronicles are known, and five of the six began before or with 776. Insofar as the treatment of the years after 776 was organized around numbered Olympiads, the authors of these chronicles must have started their victor catalogs with the first Olympiad. The end points of five Olympiad chronicles are known, and four of the five ran up to the author's own time. The sole exception in both cases was Dionysius of Halicarnassus' Antiquitates Romanae. Dionysius began with the origins of Rome, but his victor catalog did not start until the 68th Olympiad (508). He also did not take his account down to his own time, but instead ended with the outbreak of the First Punic War in 264. Dionysius' work was exceptional because he tailored the Olympiad framework to fit Roman history and the existing historiographical tradition on Rome.