Should I refresh old pages or publish new ones?
Refresh first. The pages being cited are the recently updated ones, not the recently published ones, and unedited new articles fade within months. Publishing at volume is also the one behaviour Google's spam policy is written against.
The case for refreshing is in the numbers, not in taste. Across nearly eight thousand pages cited by AI answers, seventy-two percent had been updated within the year while only forty-two percent had been published within it. When a page last changed matters more than when it first appeared. Meanwhile two thousand unedited AI articles on fresh domains peaked at two and a half months and then sank, from a quarter of them ranking somewhere in the top hundred to three percent, with no recovery.
Refreshing is also structurally safe. Google's policy targets purpose and scale, not whether a machine wrote the text. A site that published 850,000 generated pages was deindexed by hand, and its ChatGPT citations vanished with it, because the AI engines lean on the same index. Bringing forty pages you already own up to date does not look like that to anyone.
The catch is that a refresh is only worth doing if it is measured, because a page can be rewritten worse. That is why every refresh we ship is half of an experiment: the rewritten page has a matched twin we leave alone, and at ninety days the two are compared. A rewrite that lost comes straight back off, and the report says so.
New content still has a place, especially on a site with nothing to refresh yet. It just does not become the product, and it lives inside the same comparison.
72% of pages cited by AI tools had been updated within the last year; only 42% had been published within it. Content older than three years is nearly absent.
7,683 dated pages, 47,097 citations across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity
Unedited AI articles peaked at two and a half months. Their share ranking in the top 100 fell from 28% to 3% over sixteen months and never recovered.
2,000 articles on 20 fresh domains, tracked 16 months
A site with over 850,000 AI-generated pages received a manual action for scaled content abuse, its directory was deindexed, and its ChatGPT citations disappeared with it.
One site, documented in full
The free check reads your own site and tells you which of your pages have not been touched in over a year, and which is the oldest. No account, no estimate, about a minute.