Refresh on a real cadence
What the scan checks: it reads dateModified (falling back to datePublished) from the page’s Article or WebPage schema and grades the age in bands, rather than at a single 12-month cliff:
| Age of the content | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Inside 90 days (60 on YMYL topics) | Pass |
| 90 days to 12 months | Warning, with the actual age |
| Over 12 months | Fail |
| Over 12 months, with a visible “evergreen” or “last reviewed” marker | Warning, not a fail |
No date in the schema at all is a warning: we cannot grade what is not declared.
Why it matters for AI search visibility
Section titled “Why it matters for AI search visibility”Freshness is one of the few content signals with a large, independent measurement behind it. Ahrefs’ study of roughly 17 million citations across seven AI platforms found that about half of all AI citations point at content under about 13 weeks old, and that AI-cited content averages meaningfully fresher than the standard organic top ten. Practitioner analyses of citation datasets converge on the same shape: pages that have not been updated in 90 days lose citation share.
That is where the 90-day band comes from. It is not a threshold anyone published as a rule; it is the point at which the measured citation curve turns down, so it is the working refresh cadence for the pages you actually want cited.
The 60-day band on YMYL content (money, health, law, insurance, safety, civics) is the manual’s own tighter cadence for regulated topics, where being out of date is not just a ranking problem.
The fix
Section titled “The fix”- Refresh the content for real, then update the date. The order matters. An incremented
dateModifiedwith no change to the body is detectable (engines can compare the content they hold against the date you claim) and it is one of the fastest ways to get your markup discounted. - Show the date to the reader as well. That is C8: a visible “Last updated:
” near the top. A date that exists only in JSON-LD is a claim; a date on the page is a claim a reader can check. - Prioritise by tier, not by alphabet. Your top 20% of pages by traffic and commercial intent get the 90-day cycle. The rest can run on six months.
- An update log beats a date. A short “What changed, and when” block at the foot of an evergreen page is the strongest version of this signal, because it is the one both a reader and an engine can verify.
If the page genuinely does not change
Section titled “If the page genuinely does not change”Some content is not supposed to move. The scan honours that, because the manual’s own criterion has the escape hatch built in: content dated within the last 12 months or framed explicitly as evergreen.
Put the framing on the page, visibly: “Evergreen. Last reviewed: