For retainer clients, we audit the top 50 organic and AI-cited pages every 90 days. Any page with a dateModified older than 6 months gets a real refresh — new opening paragraph, updated stats, expanded or new FAQ entries, fresh internal links to the latest cluster pieces.
Cost: roughly 2-4 hours per page. Return: typical citation share lift of 20-40% on the refreshed pages, plus an organic ranking bump on average.
Quarterly for top commercial pages. Every 6-12 months for evergreen reference. Rarely for true historical content.
Yes — engines read it as a freshness signal, and users perceive it as a quality signal. Always show updatedDate visibly.
Almost never if you preserve URL, H1, and the core answer. We have refreshed thousands of pages and seen drops in less than 5% of cases.
Update. Republishing forces a redirect chain and resets the page's authority signals. Only republish if the topic has shifted meaningfully.