Do AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity prefer to cite “fresh” content? We analyzed 17 million citations across 7 AI search platforms to find out.

As we clamor to optimize for AI search visibility, I’ve seen suggestions that we should update pages more frequently to boost their chance of being cited.

To test the theory, we used data from Ahrefs Brand Radar to extract 16.975 million cited URLs from across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AI Overviews, and the good old-fashioned organic Google SERPs. We then calculated…

  • The average number of days since the cited articles were published (using the date the articles were first seen by our crawler), and
  • The average number of days since the cited articles were last updated (using the last published date from our Content Explorer database)

…to see if AI assistants really “prefer” fresher content when compared to traditional Google Search.

See your AI visibility with Ahrefs Brand Radar

The data for this research comes from Ahrefs’ Brand Radar. Discover what AI assistants say about your brand, reach new audiences, and turn AI search into your next growth channel.

warned against updating publish dates without any corresponding changes in the page content.
  • Content freshness is one among many factors that influence visibility. Low-quality, irrelevant content that’s updated every day will not have a magic positive effect on your visibility in AI search.
  • Every choice has an opportunity cost, and I suspect that most brands will see better results from creating new, high-quality content than they will from committing resources to extremely frequent content updating.

    • Comments or feedback on this research? Let me know on LinkedIn.

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