RULE: Every page ships with a publish date and a last-updated date. Refresh quarterly minimum.

Rule: Every Candid Creative content page (blog post, article, case study, KB entry, even service pages where appropriate) ships with both a datePublished and a dateModified, both as visible UI and as Article / BlogPosting schema. Refresh cadence is at minimum quarterly for evergreen pages; at minimum monthly for high-value pages.

Why: Two independent datasets confirm a sharp recency bias in AI citation:

• Seer Interactive (Oct 2025): 65% of AI bot hits target content under 1 year old; 89% under 3 years. See Seer Interactive (Oct 2025): 65% of AI bot hits target content under 1 year old; 89% under 3 years.
• Ahrefs (2025, 17M citations): AI-cited content is 25.7% fresher (publish) and 13.1% fresher (updated) than traditional organic results. See Ahrefs (2025, 17M citations): AI-cited content is 25.7% fresher than traditional organic results.

A page published once and never updated falls out of the 65% "fresh" bucket within 12 months. The fix isn't cosmetic — dateModified updates on CSS changes don't fool the system. Real freshness means real content updates: new data, new examples, new sources, new conclusions.

How to apply:

• Every Markdown / MDX entry has published: and modified: in frontmatter; both are enforced by Zod schema (or equivalent).
• The visible page UI shows both dates near the title.
• A quarterly audit identifies pages with modified > 90 days old and either refreshes them or marks them as historical reference.
• For service / pricing pages, the modified updates on real data changes (price changes, scope changes), not on cosmetic edits.