Cached page
A cached page is a stored copy of a web page, kept by a search engine, browser or server so it doesn't have to be fetched again.
A cached page is a saved copy of a web page. Search engines keep one of every page they crawl, browsers keep copies of pages you've visited, and content delivery networks keep copies near their visitors. Each one serves or works from that copy until it decides to fetch the page again.
For a marketer, the copy matters more than you'd think. Whatever a search engine or an AI platform holds is the version of your page it uses, and that version can be weeks behind the live one.
The kinds of cache
There are three you'll come across:
- A search engine's copy, which is what it indexed the last time it crawled your page
- A browser's copy, so a page opens faster on the next visit
- A server or CDN copy, so a page loads quickly from somewhere near the visitor
Servers and crawlers check in with each other to keep this cheap. A crawler asks whether a page has changed since its last visit, and if it hasn't, the server answers with a 304 Not Modified and sends nothing else.
Why old copies matter in AI answers
AI platforms that search the web work from an index of pages they've read before, and some answer from what a model learned during training. Both are copies of your pages from some earlier day.
For example, Fernhill Coffee cuts the price of its subscription on the first of the month. A week later, an answer to "How much is Fernhill's subscription?" still quotes the old price, because the page the platform reads is the copy from before the change. The live page is right. The copy isn't, yet.
You can't force every platform to refresh, but you can make it easy. Keep the page's address the same, show a visible date when you update it, and make sure crawlers can reach it so they come back sooner.
In AnswerOrbit
To see when a change starts to show in answers, open Before and after a date in Recommendations, pick the date you made it, and add the pages involved. You'll see your numbers before and after, platform by platform.