$ man content-freshness-scoring

Content Freshness Scoring

Tracking and signaling how recently content was updated — critical because pages not refreshed quarterly are 3x more likely to lose AI citations.

by Shawn Tenam

AI engines penalize stale content. Not with a manual penalty, but by naturally preferring fresher sources when multiple pages answer the same question. Pages not refreshed in 90 days are 3x more likely to lose their AI citations to competitors who updated more recently. Freshness signals include dateModified in schema, Last-Modified HTTP headers, sitemap lastmod timestamps, and actual content changes. You need all four to signal freshness effectively.

The daily tracker logs content changes. RSS feeds auto-update with new entries. Sitemaps regenerate on every deploy. The system tracks freshness by design because every deploy is a content refresh. Adding a single knowledge term updates the RSS feed, the sitemap, and the schema dateModified across all pages that reference it.