On-Page & Content · 2.7
Content Freshness
How recently a page has been genuinely updated, not just republished with a new date.
Why this matters
The customer’s side
Outdated information — old prices, an area guide that hasn't accounted for a recent development — actively misleads someone relying on it.
The AI’s side
Strongly observed: ~50% of AI citations trace to content updated in the last 3 months
Content that AI tools actually cite is on average roughly a quarter more recently updated than content that simply ranks well on Google, and about half of all AI citations trace back to content updated within the last three months.
How to check yours
Method 1 — Check your own pages
the direct check.
- 1.Check the last genuine update date on your key pages — not just the site-wide "last modified" timestamp, the actual content itself.
Method 2 — Check what's currently getting cited instead
shows whether staleness is actually costing you, not just whether it's theoretically possible.
- 1.Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity a question your page should answer.
- 2.If a competitor is cited instead, check how recently their page was updated compared to yours.
How to fix what you find
Pages are stale with genuinely outdated information
update the substance, not just the date.
- 1.Replace outdated figures — prices, average time on market, local statistics — with current ones.
- 2.Add anything genuinely new since the page was last written — a new development, a policy change, an updated example.
- 3.Avoid simply changing the "last updated" date without changing the actual content — this doesn't fool AI systems, which assess genuine freshness signals, not just timestamps.
You have too many pages to refresh individually
triage by what actually gets cited, so you're not spreading effort evenly across pages that don't matter equally.
- 1.Identify which pages are your highest-value targets — the ones most likely to be asked about, or that already get the most traffic.
- 2.Refresh those first, on a rolling basis, rather than trying to update everything at once.
You want a system so this doesn't slip
build freshness into a simple recurring habit rather than relying on remembering.
- 1.Keep a simple list of your key pages with the date each was last genuinely updated.
- 2.Set a recurring monthly reminder to pick the oldest 3-5 pages on that list and refresh them.
Keeping on top of it
This needs to be genuinely ongoing — a page that was fresh three months ago is no longer fresh today. Worth a rolling review, refreshing a handful of key pages every month.
How Reyse handles this
Done With You
we flag which pages are going stale and what needs updating.
Done For You
we refresh this content directly, on a rolling monthly basis.