@tjrobertson52

If you're trying to get recommended by AI, trying to show up in AI search, you've probably heard that AI loves freshness. They love that fresh content. Content has to be fresh if you want to be found by AI.

And while there is some truth to this, it's not that simple. AI is not keeping track of how fresh your content is or how often you're updating it. So I wanna talk about what actually matters when it comes to content freshness so you can make some smart decisions.

So there are two places where the freshness of your content might make a difference. The first is for ranking in a search engine. Because of course before you can get cited by AI, you have to rank in a search engine.

After the user enters a prompt, the AI is going to use that search engine to find a pool of candidates that it might cite. If you're not ranking among those candidates, you can't be cited. So how does freshness affect ranking?

Well, it depends on the query. If you're asking about recent events, then the search engine is naturally going to show recent articles. For more evergreen type information, freshness isn't going to matter so much.

Search engines will happily rate content that is one, three, or five years old. However, generally speaking, search engines do prefer more recent content in the same way that people prefer more recent content. All else being equal, if Google has A choice to show you an article that was written two years ago or two months ago.

It's gonna pick the one that was written most recently. However, it's important to point out that nothing I've said so far is specific to AI. Again, we're still talking about traditional search engines.

The only real difference when it comes to AI on the ranking side is that AI loves to append the current year to its searches. So after user

engines. The only real difference when it comes to AI on the ranking side is that AI loves to append the current year to its searches. So after user enters a prompt into the AI, that AI is gonna do what's called a query fan out.

It's gonna do a series of three to a dozen separate searches. And if the AI feels like recency matters for some of these searches, it'll often append a year like 2026 to the end of the query. Now, humans do this too sometimes, of course, but AI tends to do it more often.

Now, adding the current year to the title will give you more recent articles. However, the main impact it's gonna have is it'll give you more articles with 2026 in the title or 2026 in the published date or article timestamp. And for this reason, you definitely should be including the date in the title and timestamp of every article when it's relevant.

However, it's important to know that that's not going to trick traditional search engines like Google into thinking that your content is fresh. Google actually is caching old versions of your article and noticing when you update That article. The good news is you don't have to change it that much.

Adding one paragraph or changing a few sentences is typically enough. Now, so far we've only talked about ranking. But of course in AI search, ranking is just the first step.

Once you show up in that result set, you actually have to be cited by AI to influence the output. So this must be where AI differs from traditional search, right? AI just loves citing recent fresh content.

But no, when you look at the data, AI doesn't have a strong preference for recent content. No more than traditional search engines at least. ChatGPT and Google's AI is still happy to cite older content when it makes sense.

Most Reddit threads, for example, to we

al search engines at least. ChatGPT and Google's AI is still happy to cite older content when it makes sense. Most Reddit threads, for example, to we see cited are at least a year old.

Now. Like traditional search, AI does generally have a bias towards recent content. However, unlike traditional search, it's not actually tracking when you last updated your content.

Before AI even looks at your page, it's gonna look at your title tag, your description, and your URL. If the AI. Feels that recency is important, merely having the year in one of these three places will dramatically increase the chances that you get cited.

However, generally I recommend against putting the year in the URL. If you do that, you're gonna have to change the URL next year, and in that case you're starting all over in terms of page authority. Assuming The AI decides to look at your page.

It's also going to notice any time stamps or years in the content itself. But again, it's not actually noticing if the content is recent, it's just looking for that date on the page. So yes, you should be updating your most important articles annually, especially if recentcy is relevant to the topic.

But primarily what AI is rewarding is just having the year on the page.