How often should you update your website for AI search?
- AI citations decay in roughly 90 days without updates.
- Engines prefer recent, accurate content over stale pages.
- Aim for a weekly publishing habit and a quarterly refresh of top pages.
- Real edits count; changing a date does not.
Refresh your important pages at least every 90 days, because AI citations fade without fresh signals. Answer engines favor recently updated, accurate content, so pages that sit untouched tend to drop out of AI answers within a few months as newer sources replace them.
Why freshness matters to AI
Answer engines try to give current information, so they lean toward sources that look maintained. A page that has not changed in a year reads as stale, and a fresher competitor takes its spot in the answer.
AI citations decay after roughly 90 days without a refresh, which is why freshness is a ranking-style signal now.
What 'updating' actually means
Updating is not editing the published date and calling it done. Engines and readers can tell. A real update adds new information, sharpens the answer, fixes anything outdated, or responds to a new question buyers are asking.
A simple refresh cadence
You do not need to touch everything constantly. A workable rhythm for a local business:
- Publish one new answer-focused page each week.
- Refresh your top few pages every quarter (about every 90 days).
- Update any page immediately when your pricing, service area, or offer changes.
This is exactly what an agentic website does
Keeping that cadence by hand is where most owners fall off. An agentic website runs the refresh loop for you, so pages stay current without you remembering to do it.
Frequently asked questions
How often is enough?
At least quarterly for your most important pages, with a steady stream of new content in between. Weekly activity is the level that reliably keeps a site visible in AI answers.
Does updating old posts help more than new ones?
Both matter. Refreshing a strong existing page often gives faster gains, while new pages expand the questions you can get cited for.
Will Google penalize frequent updates?
No. Genuine updates that improve the page help. The only thing to avoid is fake updates that change nothing meaningful.
Want your site kept fresh automatically, every week? Get started with AWC or compare the plans.
We practice what we publish: this post is on a quarterly refresh cycle, and client sites are updated weekly through the research-to-deploy loop.