How often to update website content for AI search

Getting cited by ChatGPT isn't a trophy. It's a tenancy.

A study landed this week that should bother anyone who's been chasing AI visibility for the last year. Somantra tracked 2.4 million citation records across nearly 29,000 domains on ChatGPT and Google over seven months. The finding: 57.2% of domains that got cited showed up in exactly one month, then never appeared again.

Cited once. Then gone.

Which turns “how often to update website content” from a housekeeping question into a visibility one. It's the thing clients ask me most, and until this year the honest answer was a shrug.

I've watched the decay happen on client sites we monitor. A page gets picked up, shows in AI answers for a few weeks, then quietly stops. Nothing broke. It still ranks fine on Google. It just stopped being the answer.

How often should you update website content for AI search?

Every 90 days for the pages you want cited. Once a year for everything else.

That's the working rule, and it isn't arbitrary. Kevin Indig's State of AI Search Optimisation 2026 found that pages not updated quarterly are three times more likely to lose their AI citations entirely. AirOps' research on commercial and evaluation-stage queries found 83% of AI citations came from pages updated within the past twelve months — and more than 60% from pages refreshed within the last six.

The models are reading recency as a proxy for reliability. Not because fresh content is better, but because they've got no cheap way to check whether your 2023 pricing page is still true.

Google indexes what exists. AI answers cite what looks current.

Why AI search forgets you faster than Google does

Because there's no ranking to defend. There's only a shortlist to make.

Google's index is cumulative — a page from 2019 sits in there until you delete it, and it can climb back. AI answers work differently. Every query rebuilds a small set of sources from scratch. You're not holding position 4. You're being reconsidered, every single time, against everything published since.

That's why the drop-off is so sharp. It isn't a penalty. It's just that something newer answered the question more clearly, and the model had no reason to stay loyal to you.

We wrote about this shift when it first showed up in the data — ranking on Google no longer gets you mentioned by AI — and the citation-decay numbers are the second half of that story. Getting in was never the hard part. Staying in is.

What actually counts as an update

Changing the date doesn't. Rewriting the same argument in different words doesn't either.

An update that holds a citation does one of four things:

• Adds a fact that didn't exist before. A new number, a new rule, a new price, a new deadline.

• Corrects something that's gone stale. Old statistics, dead links, a service you no longer offer, a phone number nobody answers.

• Closes a question the page raised but never answered. Usually the one people email you about after reading it.

• Tightens the extractable answer. One clean sentence directly under the heading that a model can lift without editing.

That last one does more work than people expect. If the answer to your heading is buried in paragraph four behind a warm-up, you're asking a machine to do reading comprehension when a competitor has already handed it a sentence.

If a model has to hunt for your answer, it'll take someone else's.

The pages worth defending

Not all of them. That's the part agencies won't tell you, because “audit everything quarterly” is a nicer invoice.

Here's how we triage it:

• Defend quarterly: your money pages, your top three or four service pages, and any article actually pulling citations or organic traffic. These are the ones with something to lose.

• Refresh annually: supporting blog posts, older explainers, case studies. Enough to keep the facts honest.

• Leave alone or delete: thin posts written years ago for a keyword nobody searches now. Updating those isn't maintenance, it's decoration. No traffic and no citations in eighteen months makes a page a candidate for deletion, not a refresh.

A trades client we worked with had 60-odd blog posts and about six that mattered. We stopped touching the other 54 and put the time into the six. Their citation footprint went up, not down.

The bit most people get backwards

They think this is a content problem. It's a systems problem.

Nobody fails to update their website because they don't know it needs updating. They fail because there's no list, no owner, and no calendar entry. So the site drifts, quarter by quarter, until someone notices the enquiries have thinned out.

What works is dull: a spreadsheet of your fifteen most important URLs, a last-reviewed date against each, and one recurring hour in the diary every quarter. That's the whole discipline.

We've argued before that your competitors aren't better at SEO, they're just faster. Citation decay is the same argument wearing different clothes. The businesses holding their AI visibility aren't smarter. They just have a cadence.

What this looks like on Wix

Reasonably straightforward, which is rather the point of building here.

Wix stamps modified dates automatically and pushes them into your sitemap, so a genuine edit gets picked up without you touching anything technical. Structured data is generated for you, which means the facts you update travel in a format machines can parse rather than sitting as loose text. And Wix's AI Visibility Overview now shows whether ChatGPT and Gemini are citing you — so you can watch decay happen instead of guessing.

That last one changes the job. Twelve months ago we were optimising blind. Now you can open a report and say: that page got cited in May, hasn't since, let's go and find out what changed.

If you want the mechanics of that report, we covered it in how to get your business cited in ChatGPT.

AI visibility isn't a launch. It's a subscription you pay in edits.

Where to start this week

Pick your five most important pages. Open each one. Ask two questions: is every fact on here still true, and is the answer to the main question in the first two sentences?

That's a ninety-minute job, and it'll do more for your AI search visibility than another 1,500-word post nobody asked for.

If you'd rather not run that on your own site, drop us a line — we do this quarterly for the clients we look after, and we're happy to talk through how it'd work for yours.

— Matt

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Frequently asked questions

How often should I update my website content?

Every 90 days for your key service and money pages, and once a year for supporting content. Pages not refreshed quarterly are around three times more likely to lose their AI citations.

Does changing the publish date help with AI search?

No. Models and search engines both look at whether the content actually changed, not the timestamp. Date-only edits are ignored at best and read as a quality signal at worst.

What is AI citation decay?

It's when a page that was being quoted in AI answers stops appearing. Research published in August 2026 found 57.2% of cited domains showed up in one month and never again — the citation wasn't lost to a penalty, just to something fresher.

Do I need to update every page on my site?

No, and trying to is how the important pages get neglected. Defend your top ten to fifteen URLs quarterly, review the rest annually, and delete anything with no traffic and no citations after eighteen months.

Can I see whether AI is citing my site?

Yes. Wix's AI Visibility Overview reports whether ChatGPT and Gemini reference your business, and Google Search Console now surfaces generative AI performance data. Between them you can spot decay early rather than after the enquiries dry up.