Content freshness
Freshness measures how current a piece of content is: publication date, last substantive revision, data that reflects reality. Generative engines are markedly more sensitive to this than classical ranking signals.
In practice
Assistants favor recent sources to avoid stale responses — a guide dated this year outcompetes its three-year-old equivalent at equal quality. Best practice: revise genuinely, date the revision, and never update a timestamp without updating the substance. The gap between a displayed date and actual content is detectable.