THE IMPACT OF CONTENT FRESHNESS ON AI CITATIONS

Summary from the TLDR Marketing newsletter

Content cited by AI assistants runs 25.7% fresher than what ranks organically on Google, with roughly half of all citations tracing to material updated in the last 13 weeks. That edge decays fast, with a median citation half-life of about 4.5 weeks across platforms. Retrieval systems re-rank the entire candidate pool on every query rather than relying on a persistent ranking, so recency becomes an early filter for weeding out sources that might already be wrong. Perplexity and Grok weigh it most heavily, while Google's AI Overviews stay tied to core search and actually skew slightly older.