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GEO Guide · Chapter 8 of 9
Why dates and freshness matter to AI answers
This page is for the owner of a local business whose service pages have not changed in years. After reading it you will know how an assistant reads a date, which pages on your site are stale, and what to change on each one.
In one paragraph
AI assistants show a clear preference in our testing for pages that carry a recent visible date and recent facts, and when they quote an old page they quote its old prices and old hours as if they were current. A service page that was written in 2023 and never touched will either be skipped for a competitor's newer page or, worse, be quoted with its 2023 numbers. The fix is to review each money page at least once a season, update the facts that have changed, state the current year in the copy where it belongs, and show a visible last-updated date that the page's structured data agrees with.
What freshness means to an AI assistant
When an assistant retrieves pages for a question about a service or a price, it has to decide which page describes the present. What it has is the visible date on the page, the dateModified field in the page’s structured data, the dates it finds inside the text, and how recently the search index crawled the page. Google and Bing both record the last crawl and the last change, and the assistants read from those indexes.
No AI company has published how much weight a date carries. What we have observed is that when two pages answer the same question and one shows a date from this year and the other from three years ago, the newer one is cited far more often. And when the only page available is old, the assistant quotes it anyway, with its old facts.
So there are two costs to a stale page. The first is losing the citation to someone newer. The second is being cited with a price you no longer charge, which brings a customer to the phone already expecting a number you cannot honor. The older SEO version of this problem is covered under thin and stale content.
What stale pages look like on an HVAC company site
Magic Valley Comfort Heating and Air runs six service trucks out of Twin Falls and serves Jerome, Kimberly, Filer and Buhl. It runs a maintenance plan with 1,400 members. The website was built in early 2023 and the owner has been too busy to touch it since.
A homeowner in Kimberly asks Gemini in September 2026 what a furnace tune-up costs in Twin Falls and who offers one. Gemini names Magic Valley Comfort and says the tune-up is $79, quoting the special that ran in fall 2023. The current price is $119. The dispatcher spends the first minute of the call explaining that the website is out of date, and the homeowner books with the company that quoted $109.
The furnace page says the company installs Lennox and Carrier, and it has carried Bryant since 2025. It mentions the federal tax credit for heat pumps by its 2023 amount. The page footer reads Copyright 2023. The schema on every page shows a dateModified of February 2023 because the theme sets it once and never changes it. Every signal an assistant can read says this business last spoke in 2023.
A worked example: refreshing a Twin Falls HVAC company's money pages
The owner listed every page a customer might act on and checked the visible date, the schema dateModified, and whether the facts were still true. Here is the result before and after the refresh.
| Page | Visible date before | Schema dateModified before | Facts wrong before | After |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Furnace tune-up | None | 2023-02-14 | Price $79, now $119 | Updated September 2026, price $119 |
| Furnace installation | None | 2023-02-14 | Brands missing Bryant, tax credit amount | Updated September 2026, brands and credit corrected |
| Heat pump installation | None | 2023-02-14 | Rebate program expired 2024 | Updated September 2026, current Idaho Power rebate |
| Maintenance plan | None | 2023-02-14 | Plan price $149, now $179; two visits, now two plus filter | Updated September 2026 |
| Emergency service | None | 2023-02-14 | After-hours fee $95, now $125 | Updated September 2026 |
| Service area | None | 2023-02-14 | Buhl and Filer missing | Updated September 2026, five towns listed |
The tune-up page opened like this before and after.
Keep your furnace running efficiently all winter with a professional tune-up from Magic Valley Comfort. Our fall special is just $79 for a complete 21-point inspection. Call today to schedule before the cold weather hits.
Magic Valley Comfort Heating and Air performs furnace tune-ups in Twin Falls, Jerome, Kimberly, Filer and Buhl for $119 as of September 2026, and members of the maintenance plan receive the tune-up as part of their $179 annual membership. The tune-up covers a 21-point inspection and a carbon monoxide test and takes about 60 minutes. Fall appointments are booked from September 1, and the schedule fills by mid October.
A visible line reading Last updated September 8, 2026 was added under the heading of each page, the theme was changed so the schema dateModified follows the real edit date, and the footer year was set to update automatically. In the next month’s prompt log, Gemini and ChatGPT both quoted $119, and Perplexity cited the page with a 2026 date shown beside it. The number attached to the company’s name was finally the right one.
How to check your own pages for freshness
- List every page a customer acts on: each service, the pricing or specials page, the service area, hours and contact.
- Open each one and read it for numbers. Every price, fee, rebate, brand, plan detail and town must be checked against what is true this month. Write down each one that is wrong.
- Look for a visible date. If the page has none, an assistant is relying on the index and the schema. If it has one and it is more than a year old, the page is telling assistants to look elsewhere.
- Paste the page address into Google’s Rich Results Test at search.google.com/test/rich-results, open the Article or WebPage block, and read dateModified. If it shows the date the site was built, the theme is not updating it, and your web designer will need to change that setting.
- In Google Search Console, open Pages under Indexing, click any of your service pages, and read the last crawl date.
- Ask ChatGPT and Gemini what your business charges for your most common service. If the number is wrong, find the page it came from and fix that page first.
What we do about freshness and dates
You will get a table of every money page on your site with its visible date, its schema date and each fact that no longer matches what you charge or offer. The wrong facts are corrected in one pass, a visible last-updated line is added, and the site is set so the structured data carries the real edit date from then on. Each season you will get the same table again with the questions to answer about what has changed, so the pages stay current without you having to remember. This is part of every site audit, which is where the work starts.
Questions people ask about GEO: why dates and freshness matter to AI answers
Do AI assistants prefer recent content?
In our testing, assistants cite the page with the newer visible date far more often when two pages answer the same question, and they quote whatever facts the page they chose contains. Keeping money pages current and dated is the safe course whichever way the weighting goes.
Should I show a last updated date on my web pages?
Yes, a visible last-updated date on service and pricing pages gives assistants and search engines a plain signal that the facts are current, as long as the date is honest and the schema dateModified agrees with it. Update the date only when the content actually changes. A date that changes daily with no edit is treated as noise.
How often should I update my website content for AI search?
Review every page a customer acts on at least once a season, and update it whenever a price, brand, rebate, plan or service area changes. Most local businesses find that four reviews a year keep the pages true. The blog and the about page matter less than the pages that state prices and hours.
Why is ChatGPT quoting old prices from my website?
ChatGPT is quoting the price that appears on the page it retrieved, and that page still shows the old number or was last crawled when it did. Correct the page, add a visible date, and submit the URL in Bing Webmaster Tools so the new version is picked up. Also check any directory or listing that repeats the old price.
Does the copyright year in the footer matter for SEO or AI?
A footer that says a year two or three years past is a small stale signal on every page, and it is the easiest one to fix. Set the footer to display the current year automatically. A page whose footer, visible date and schema all agree removes one reason to doubt it.
This page is part of the The GEO guide: how to be named by an AI assistant. The other guides: SEO, AEO, GEO.
Have us do this on your site
Send the address of your site. We fetch every page from outside, the way Google does, and send back the list: every page, every flag, and what we would fix first. Then we fix it, verify each change from outside, and report it in plain language every month.
