Does republishing a page with a new date refresh it for AI engines?

No. Changing the visible date or the dateModified field without changing the content is cosmetic, and answer engines that re-fetch and re-embed your page will see the same facts. A genuine refresh updates the data, examples, and claims on the page. The signal that matters is whether the extractable answer changed, not whether a timestamp moved.

How often should I refresh evergreen pages versus news pages?

Treat the roughly 90-day pattern as a default for pages you actively want cited, then adjust by topic volatility. Fast-moving subjects (pricing, model names, platform features) may need monthly attention; stable reference material can hold for two or three quarters. Let your citation tracking, not the calendar alone, decide which pages re-enter the queue.

Will updating content hurt my existing rankings or citations?

Not if you preserve the URL, the core entity coverage, and the answer structure. Risk comes from gutting a page, changing its primary topic, or breaking the heading hierarchy that engines extract from. Refresh in place: keep the canonical URL, keep the answer-first paragraph, and improve the facts. Avoid changing the slug, which forces a 301 and resets accumulated signals.

Is content freshness a confirmed ranking factor for AI Overviews?

Freshness is a long-documented Google ranking signal for query-deserving-freshness topics, but the roughly 90-day citation-decay pattern for AI engines is directional, observed by practitioners, not a published law. Treat it as a planning heuristic. The defensible position: indexed, current, well-structured content is more likely to be retrieved and cited than stale content, so a refresh cadence is low-risk insurance.

How do I measure whether a refresh worked for AI citations?

Track share-of-citation, not just clicks. Run representative prompts in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini before and after the refresh, and record whether your brand or URL is named. Pair that with Search Console impressions and crawl dates. Because AEO success is fact-level extraction in zero-click answers, your scoreboard is how often you are quoted, not only how often you are visited.

Why Content Goes Stale to AI in ~90 Days (and the Fix)

Content freshness in AI search matters: AI engines tend to cite fresher pages. Build a quarterly refresh loop for your top answer pages to hold citation share.

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Index Right helps content-heavy businesses protect crawlability, indexability, metadata, structured data, Core Web Vitals, and answer-engine visibility during technical SEO migrations.

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Why Content Goes Stale to AI in ~90 Days (and the Fix)

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