Freshness Signal

Indicators of how recently a page was published or updated.

Freshness signals are indicators AI engines use to judge how current a page is: visible publication dates, "last updated" timestamps, dateModified in Article schema, and HTTP Last-Modified headers.

Research from BrightEdge (2026) found 95% of ChatGPT citations pointed to content updated within the last 10 months. Freshness is one of the strongest predictors of AI citation.

Related terms

Article Schema

JSON-LD markup that identifies a page as an article with author, date, and publisher.

Citation (AI)

An inline reference in an AI answer pointing to a source URL.