Do AIs prefer recent content?
Published on
A little, and not all of them in the same way. With Claude, a page less than six months old is cited 1.2 to 1.3 times more often than an older page, across all our corpora. With ChatGPT, displaying the year in the title does not help: it reduced citations on our French-language corpora and had no effect in English. Ahrefs measures that pages cited by AIs are on average nearly three years old. Freshness breaks ties between equally relevant pages; it does not replace relevance.
For what type of question? It all depends on the question. For news, a price, or a changing regulation, the date matters a lot. For a stable concept or a method, an old and recognized page often remains the cited source.
What we measured with Claude
Claude receives, for each page found, an indication of its age, which Anthropic's documentation describes as the date the site was last updated. We compared pages less than 180 days old to older pages. The most recent ones are cited 1.27 times more often in HVAC, 1.24 times in artificial intelligence, 1.24 times across a dozen sectors in French, and 1.19 times in English. The effect is constant, and modest.
In artificial intelligence, the effect was only present for pages in French, at 1.42 times, and not for pages in English. Yet it is present in sectors queried in English. Freshness therefore plays a role, but it is intertwined with the topic and the language: a recent page is often also a page on a moving topic.
The year in the title does not help ChatGPT
A common piece of advice is to add the year to the title to appear up to date, such as '2026 guide'. With ChatGPT, pages whose titles contain a year were cited less on our initial corpora, significantly less across a dozen sectors in French, at 0.44 times, and as much as others in English. None of our corpora show a gain.
Yet models do use years in their own searches: on our questions from September 15, 2026, 18% of ChatGPT searches and 17% of Claude searches contained a year. The year helps the AI search for dated information; it does not make it select a page just because it appears in its title. It belongs in the text, where the dated information is provided.
What other studies measure
Ahrefs compared the age of pages cited by AI assistants to that of Google results, in a study published on July 28, 2025. Cited pages are 25.7% more recent: 1,064 days on average compared to 1,432 days. ChatGPT cites the most recent pages, 958 days on average, while AI Overviews cite the oldest. Even among AIs, a cited page is therefore nearly three years old.
A second study from Ahrefs, published on April 15, 2026, on ChatGPT 5.2, nuances this result: among pages retrieved for the same question, older, established pages tend to be cited, while the most recent ones are discarded. For news, however, cited articles are around 200 days old compared to 300 for non-cited ones. Ahrefs concludes that relevance decides and freshness breaks ties. In the laboratory, researchers showed in September 2025 that language models used to rank passages favor those bearing a recent date: their preference between two passages can reverse in up to 25% of cases on average once a date is added.
What Google says
Google indicates that it uses systems that show fresher content for searches where it is expected, making freshness a query-specific matter rather than a general bonus. And Google warns against a common practice: changing the date of a page to make it appear recent when its content has not substantially changed.
A displayed date must therefore correspond to a real update. In our records, a significant share of cited pages does not even display any detectable date: from 28 to 42% for Claude depending on the corpus, and from 33 to 50% for Gemini. The absence of a date does not prevent being cited; a false date, however, can cost trust.
What this changes for a company
It is useful to date your pages and actually update them when the information changes, especially on moving topics: regulations, prices, technologies. It is useless to inflate a title with the year, or to change a date without changing the substance.
Freshness is a modest advantage added to a relevant page, not a way to catch up for a page that does not answer the question. Each page in this section displays its publication date and, if applicable, its update date.
What we do not know
Page age is only measured in Claude, which receives it in search results; it blends with the topic and language of the pages. The presence of a date is detected automatically and may be missing. Our measurements are based on the models' API.
Sources
- Ahrefs, Ryan Law — do AI assistants prefer to cite recent content?, .
- Ahrefs, Louise Linehan — "Why ChatGPT cites pages", .
- Fang, Tao, Chen, Chang, Sakai — recency bias in reranking by language models, .
- Google Search Central — ranking systems guide, .
- Google Search Central — creating helpful, reliable content, .
- Anthropic — documentation for Claude's web search tool, .
- FaireDuBruit measurements, from September 4 to 16, 2026 — see "How we measured".