A restaurant reprints its menu with today's date but serves the same tired dishes. Nobody is fooled twice. The restaurant next door changes three dishes a season and quietly becomes the one people recommend.
What the evidence supports
There is a real recency effect, and it is more modest than the industry claims. Ahrefs' analysis of around 17 million citations across seven AI platforms found cited pages averaged 1,064 days old, against 1,432 days for traditional organic results — a meaningful skew towards fresher content, but note that both averages are measured in years. TIER B
You will also see claims that content under 30 days old earns "3.2× more citations", or that a refresh programme moved a citation rate from 12% to 47%. TIER C I could not trace a method behind either. Ignore them.
The honest summary: recency helps at the margin; it does not override relevance or evidence. A three-year-old page with a unique number will beat a one-week-old page of generic advice.
What actually counts as a refresh
Changing the date is not a refresh. It is worse than nothing, because if it becomes a site-wide pattern it is trivially detectable and it destroys the credibility of your dates generally. A refresh means at least one of:
- New data, new figures, or updated prices.
- A regulation, process or requirement that has changed.
- A new section answering a question you have started being asked.
- Removal of something that is no longer true.
When you do make a substantive change, then do update both the visible "last updated" date on the page and the dateModified field in your Article schema, and keep them consistent with each other.
Several publishing tools and SEO plugins will helpfully set dateModified to the build date across your entire site every time you deploy. Your whole archive then claims to have been updated this morning. This is the single most common way a well-intentioned site ends up with dishonest dates, and nobody notices because no human reads schema. Check what your build actually stamps.
A maintenance routine that fits a real business
The ones tied to revenue. Ignore the rest.
Twenty pages, four quarters, five a quarter. Each one gets looked at annually. That is a sustainable rhythm, not a project.
Is anything on it now false? Is there a number that should be this year's? Is there a question we now get asked that this page does not answer?
In that order. Always in that order.
So the update reaches ChatGPT's retrieval layer without waiting for a crawl.
Put a recurring quarterly appointment in the calendar to review five pages. The routine matters far more than the individual edits.