Keep key pages current: AI favours recent content.

The best free resources

1. Study: Content Recency's Impact on AI Visibility in 2026 — Sonny Vasquez, Seer Interactive (2026-07-24)
   75% of cited pages updated within a year; maintenance beats new publishing

2. New Study: AI Assistants Prefer to Cite "Fresher" Content (17 Million Citations Analyzed) — Ryan Law, Ahrefs (2025-07-28)
   17M citations: ~26% fresher than organic; AI Overviews least affected

3. Do Large Language Models Favor Recent Content? A Study on Recency Bias in LLM-Based Reranking — Hanpei Fang, Tetsuya Sakai et al., arXiv (Waseda University) (2025-09-14 (v2 2026-09-21))
   Dates alone shift LLM rankings, up to 25% preference reversals

4. I Found It in the Code, Science Proved It in the Lab: The Recency Bias That's Reshaping AI Search — Metehan Yesilyurt, metehan.ai (2025-10-03)
   Practitioner take on the recency paper plus ChatGPT freshness-scoring finding. Some claims go beyond the paper.

5. Influence your byline dates in Google Search — — (Google), Google Search Central (live 2026-11)
   How to mark datePublished/dateModified, with visible and marked-up dates kept consistent

Strategies for this step

• Maintain Aggressive Content Freshness

• Include dateModified and Freshness Timestamps

See all GEO strategies →

Curated by effectiveGEOstrategy.com. Every link checked 2026-11-10. Know a better free resource? Tell us.