What Freshness means
It's not a single ranking factor. It's a relevance modifier that matters heavily on topics where currency affects correctness and barely at all on stable ones.
The key word is genuine. Changing a date without changing content is transparent, and systems increasingly discount it.
Why it matters for AI search
AI retrieval leans on freshness noticeably, particularly Perplexity. Stale pages lose citations to more recently updated competitors even when the stale page is more authoritative.
In fast-moving categories — AI tooling, pricing, platform capabilities — six-month-old content is frequently just wrong, and being cited with wrong facts is worse than absence.
See it in action
The same page, at different ages, on a currency-sensitive topic.
Citation rate decays with age on time-sensitive topics.
On stable topics this curve is almost flat. The mistake is applying a freshness programme sitewide instead of to the pages where currency genuinely affects correctness.
How to get it right
Managing freshness properly
- Identify which pages are currency-sensitive; most aren't
- Set a real update cadence for those, tied to when the underlying facts change
- Make dates explicit in markup with dateModified, and show them to readers
- Update substance, not just the date — cosmetic changes get discounted
- For fast-moving categories, tie the cadence to your release schedule
Common questions
Does updating the date help rankings?
Only if the content genuinely changed. Date-only updates are detectable and get discounted, and doing it sitewide devalues your dates entirely.
Which pages need a freshness programme?
Pricing, comparisons, capability documentation, anything with a year in the query, and anything in a fast-moving category. Evergreen explanations usually don't.
How does freshness affect AI citation?
Noticeably, especially on Perplexity. Retrieval favours recently updated content where currency matters, and stale pages lose to fresher competitors.
Related concepts
These come up alongside Freshness constantly.