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AI visibility

Does content freshness affect AI search

A page whose newest declared date is years old reads as abandoned to systems choosing between sources. Dates are cheap to state accurately and expensive to fake — a date derived from the build moves on every deploy while the content sits still, which is its own signal.

What 13x checks

This is rule aeo.content-freshness in the public registry: Declared dates are recent. It runs on every audit, against the pages we actually fetched, and its result is derived from the response rather than estimated.

Surface
AI visibility
Score weight
4 of the readiness score
Scope
Reported as skipped when the page renders only with JavaScript
Applies
To every site

Registry version 2026-07-30. Every rule is published, and the audit is deterministic — the same page produces the same finding every time.

The fix

The same text the audit hands you when this check fails on your own site.

The newest date declared anywhere on your crawled pages is , roughly months ago.

Recency is one of the few tie-breakers an answer engine has when two sources say much the same thing. A stale declared date is worse than no date at all: it is a positive, machine-readable signal that nobody has touched the page.

Declare the date as data, not as prose in a footer:

json code
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "WebPage",
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "dateModified": ""
}

Do not automate this from the file's mtime. A build timestamp that moves on every deploy is a lie about the content, and it is trivially detectable — every page changing daily while the text never does is a stronger negative signal than an old date. Set it when you actually review the content.

A practical pattern is to keep the review date in front matter and render it:

ts code
export const meta = {
  title: "Pricing",
  reviewedOn: "", // bump when the content is checked, not when it builds
};

If the content genuinely is current, updating the date is the whole fix.

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