Refresh the page and update its dateModified

Why it matters

AI engines weight recency aggressively for citation candidacy. A page with a `dateModified` older than a year is interpreted as "probably out of date" and downranked in the candidate pool: even when the content is still correct. Real customer data: pages on a quarterly refresh cadence see roughly 2x the AI citation rate vs identical-quality pages updated only at publish time.

The fix

**Do a real refresh, not a date bump.**

Both Google and Perplexity have been increasingly willing to penalise sites where `dateModified` diverges from actual content change (detected by comparing crawled content hashes week-over-week against the asserted `dateModified`). One drive-by date update on every page in your library is the surest way to lose the recency boost AND seed long-term skepticism about your other claims.

**What a real refresh looks like:**

1. Skim the page for the top 3-5 specific claims (numbers, dates, examples, screenshots, code snippets).
2. Update any that have shifted. Replace the stat with the current one, swap the deprecated API for the current one, refresh the screenshot.
3. Add one new paragraph that captures what changed in the topic since the last refresh.
4. Bump `dateModified` to today.

Then re-publish:

```json
{
  "@type": "BlogPosting",
  "datePublished": "2024-03-12",
  "dateModified": "2026-05-28",  // <-- now reflects the real edit
  "headline": "...",
  "author": { ... }
}
```

**A practical refresh cadence:**

- Top 5 most-trafficked pages: quarterly. Substantive edits each time.
- Top 6-20: every 6 months. Lighter pass.
- Rest of the library: annual review, prune what no longer applies, redirect what no longer matters.

References

• Google Search Central: freshness signals