Ahrefs did a study using a massive dataset (17M URL citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, AIO & organic SERPs) to see if AI assistants "prefer" fresh content.

They identified a consistent pattern & made an observation about citation order:

• AI assistants cite almost 26% fresher content than organic SERPs based on the original publish date
• AI assistants cite about 13% fresher content than organic SERPs based on the "updated on" date
• ChatGPT & Perplexity appear to cite URLs from newest to oldest

This implies publishing new URLs will get you more citations in AI assistants than updating old URLs.

Considerations:

• The amount of work it takes to create new vs update
• Publish/updated dates are isolated here. We don't know anything about the content quality, EEAT, topical authority, backlink profiles etc. Maybe recently published content is more likely to have other attributes that get it cited more.
• Ahrefs used their Brand Radar here, which tracks "seed keywords" - not the same as real output from real prompts.

They end by reminding everyone Google is still where most searches happen, and making low-effort updates for a fresher date isn't going to magically boost your visibility in AI search.