Content Is Still King

Half the citations a page earns are gone in about a month.

That's the median citation half-life across AI answer engines. It comes out of a NoGood writeup that stitches together three separate studies, including an Ahrefs pull of nearly 17 million cited URLs.

I've been rescanning the same LA businesses every few weeks and watching the named companies shuffle. I assumed that was the models updating. A lot of it is just somebody else publishing something newer on the same question.

Roughly half of what gets cited was updated in the last 13 weeks. And yet the average cited page is close to three years old, so old pages get cited constantly. They just have to look like someone still works on them.

Two cheap fixes came out of the research. Adding real statistics lifted citation visibility up to 37% on Perplexity. Adding quotes from credible sources, 41%. That's an afternoon of editing, not a rewrite.

What doesn't work is bumping the publish date and changing nothing. Google's been warning about that for years and the answer engines are catching it now too.

I've believed content is king my whole career and I still do. What I had wrong was treating the publish date as the finish line. We don't have a refresh schedule for anything we've written. Building one this month, though I suspect it's really the top 20 pages that carry it and the rest can sit.

Check out the article here, worth a read for sure: https://lnkd.in/g8Ys3ttG