Somewhere in every content team there is a spreadsheet of old posts and a plan to "refresh" them by changing the dates. It is appealing because it takes a morning and the dates all look current afterwards. Google has addressed this directly and the answer is blunt. This page gives you the quote, explains why the shortcut fails, and shows what an update has to contain before the date is honest.
Source: John Mueller, Google, 5 February 2022, reported by Search Engine Roundtable. Checked October 2026.
Where to start
What Google said
John Mueller of Google addressed this on 5 February 2022. On when a date change is appropriate:
"When you write something new, or significantly change something existing, then change the date."
And on doing it by itself:
"Changing the date without doing anything else is just noise & useless."
Two things follow. The first is that there is a legitimate use for updating a date — Google is not saying never touch it. The second is that the trigger is the work, not the calendar. The date is a description of what happened to the page. If nothing happened, the new date is simply a false statement, and the only thing it reliably does is make your archive untrustworthy to the humans reading it.
It is worth being clear about scope. This is Google talking about Google. No other engine has published equivalent guidance, so nobody can tell you precisely how ChatGPT or Perplexity treat a date. What we can say is that a date which contradicts the content is a bad signal to any reader, machine or otherwise.
Has this post earned a new date?
The useful question is not "how old is it" but "is any of it now wrong". Those come apart constantly. A well-written explainer from three years ago can be entirely accurate. A post from April can be wrong already if the product it describes changed in May.
Does it need a refresh?
Answer honestly about one specific post.
Note what the tool will never tell you to do: change the date and nothing else. That option does not exist because it is not a form of maintenance.
What a real refresh contains
If the post has earned an update, here is what actually needs to change before the date does.
Correct what is wrong. Prices, feature names, rules, the names of tools and companies. This is the part that makes the refresh worth doing at all.
Rewrite the opening. The first two sentences are what gets quoted, and they are usually the most dated part of an old post. Make them answer the question as you would answer it today.
Fill the gap. If readers consistently ask something the page does not address, add it as its own heading rather than tucking it into an existing paragraph.
Cut what has expired. Removing a section about a product that no longer exists improves the page more than adding three new paragraphs.
Then handle the dates properly. Published and updated are different fields. Keep the original published date, set an updated date, and show both. A page claiming to be written today about something from three years ago reads as dishonest to a person, whatever an engine makes of it.
Refresh log
Write down what you actually changed. If you cannot fill this in, the date should not move.
- Stop any project whose plan is "update the dates". Google called that noise, in those words.
- Sort old posts by what is now wrong, not by age.
- Fix the facts first — prices, names, rules. That is the whole value of a refresh.
- Rewrite the first two sentences. They are what gets quoted and they date fastest.
- Keep the published date, add an updated date, and show both.
- If you cannot describe what changed in one sentence, leave the date alone.
Two limits worth stating.
The quote is from Google and from 2022. It is still the clearest public statement on the subject and Google has not contradicted it, but it is one company's guidance about its own systems, delivered on social media rather than in formal documentation. Treat it as strong and well-sourced, not as a law of nature.
Nobody outside OpenAI, Perplexity and Google knows how much any of them weigh recency. Freshness plainly matters for questions about things that change — nobody wants last year's pricing — and plainly matters less for questions that do not change. Anyone quoting you a precise freshness weighting for ChatGPT is making it up.
Sources: John Mueller, Google, 5 February 2022, as reported by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable, 7 February 2022. Quotations verbatim. Checked October 2026. Every tool on this page runs in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.