Content freshness
How recently a page was published or updated, and whether readers and machines can tell.
Content freshness is how recently a page was published or updated, and whether that's visible to the people and machines reading it. A pricing page last updated two years ago may still be right, but nobody reading it can be sure.
Why it matters in AI answers
Many of the questions people ask AI assistants depend on current facts: what something costs, which tools are best this year, what changed in a product. When an answer engine picks pages to answer from, a page that shows when it was last updated is easier to judge than one that doesn't.
Freshness is also about the facts themselves. If your old blog post still says you deliver only in London, and you've delivered nationwide for a year, an answer that reads the old post can repeat the old claim.
For example, a software company changes its prices in March. Its pricing page is updated the same day, but a comparison article on its blog still lists last year's prices. A month later, some AI answers quote the old prices, citing the blog post.
Keeping pages fresh
Updating a date without changing anything doesn't make a page fresher. What helps is updating the facts that have changed, saying on the page when it was last updated, and keeping the pages that answers already use up to date first.
In AnswerOrbit
A visible date is one of the eight Page checks in Recommendations. A page passes when it shows a date. If it doesn't, the check says a platform can't tell how current the page is, and suggests showing when the page was last updated.
When an answer says something about you that contradicts your facts, Claims quotes the sentence, and Inaccuracy drivers shows the pages behind the wrong claim, so you can find the out-of-date page that started it. See Recommendations and Claims and facts.