Key takeaways
- A git-diff style refresh changes the smallest set of lines that fixes what's wrong: stale facts, weak openings, missing questions, dead links. The rest of the page stays untouched.
- Decay rates differ by content type. Promptwatch's data shows news loses half its ChatGPT citations in 36 days, while landing pages and docs hold on much longer. Refresh in that order.
- Pages that describe what a company sells make up about 39% of ChatGPT citations, so prices, specs and feature claims are the highest-value lines to keep accurate.
- Keep the URL, write a visible changelog, and measure before and after. A refresh is a tested change, not a guarantee.
Why a diff mindset beats a rewrite
Most refresh advice amounts to "update the post." That's vague, and it leads to one of two outcomes. Either someone changes a year in the title and calls it done, or someone rewrites the whole thing and accidentally throws away the paragraphs that were earning citations and rankings.
Developers solved this problem a long time ago. You don't rewrite a codebase to fix a bug. You change the lines that are wrong, review the diff, and merge. The same logic works for articles. A page that has been ranking or getting cited for two years has proven something about itself. The structure, the angle, and some of the sentences are doing real work. Your job is to find the parts that decayed and patch them.
There's also a practical reason. When you only touch specific lines, you can explain every change, tie it to a reason, and later check whether it helped. A full rewrite gives you no such trail.
What the data says about decay
Not every page ages at the same speed, and AI search makes this more visible than classic SEO did. Promptwatch tracked every page ChatGPT cited on July 6, 2026 for 90 days. The full numbers are in Promptwatch Data's content half-life report. The short version:
| Content type | Still cited after 30 days | Still cited after 60 days | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Landing pages | 78% | 69% | Likely half-life near or beyond 90 days |
| Documentation | 76% | 67% | Smallest drop after day 0 (93% cited again) |
| Comparisons | 72% | 63% | Holds well |
| Listicles | n/a | 60% | Likely near or beyond 90 days |
| Product pages, reviews, how-tos | n/a | about 55% | Half-life of 74 to 77 days |
| News | n/a | 41% | Half gone after 36 days; almost a quarter never cited again |
Two things stand out to me. First, news is a poor candidate for a refresh. It's a short burst format, so treat it that way. Second, how-tos and product pages decay about as fast as each other, which surprised me a bit. Product pages feel evergreen, but if specs, availability or prices drift, the citations go with them.
The practical reading: refresh how-tos, product pages and reviews on a rolling cycle of roughly 60 days. Check landing pages, docs and pricing pages whenever a fact changes. Invest in comparisons and listicles, because they keep more than 60% of their citations after two months, and refresh them before they slip.
Which lines are worth editing
If you're patching rather than rewriting, you need to know which lines matter. Promptwatch's citation share by content type data (Sep 28 to Oct 4, 2026) helps here:
| Content type | Share of ChatGPT citations |
|---|---|
| Product pages | 22.4% |
| Landing pages | 16.8% |
| Listicles | 13.6% |
| How-tos | 8.7% |
| Documentation | 7.5% |
| General articles | 6.1% |
| Comparisons | 5.9% |
| News | 5.7% |
| FAQ | 3.3% |
| Reviews | 1.7% |
Product plus landing pages are 39% of citations. Editorial formats together are 43%. For commercial prompts, product pages, landing pages, listicles and comparisons add up to almost 70%. So when you open an old article, the lines that deserve your attention first are:
- Prices, plan names, limits and specs
- Step lists in how-tos (the part that gets quoted)
- The first 100 words, which should answer the main question directly
- Comparison tables and "best of" rankings
- FAQ blocks, which Promptwatch's data suggests are worth adding for informational intent
- Dates, years and statistics
Everything else, the narrative, the examples that still hold, the internal structure, you leave alone.
The git-diff refresh workflow
Step 1: Snapshot the page (your commit baseline)
Before touching anything, save the current state. That means the exported text of the page, plus the numbers you'll compare against later:
- Clicks, impressions and average position from Google Search Console for the last 28 days and the prior period
- Whether the page is cited in AI answers, and for which prompts
- Whether AI crawlers are visiting it and hitting errors
Search Console is the free starting point. Compare the last six months to the previous period and note pages with falling clicks or impressions. SEOptimer's guide also suggests prioritizing pages sitting at positions 11 to 20, since they often need only minor updates to reach page one. I agree with that. Those pages are the cheapest wins.
For the AI side, a visibility platform helps. Promptwatch can show which prompts cite a given URL, and its Page Tracker lets you watch any page and see the prompts that cite it. That gives you a before-and-after for citations, not just rankings.
If you'd rather start with a crawler to find stale or thin pages across the whole site, Sitebulb is a solid option, and its team published a content refresh guide worth reading.
Step 2: Triage by decay, not by gut feeling
Sort your candidates using the decay data above. A rough priority order:
- Product pages, pricing pages and landing pages with any factual drift (highest citation share)
- How-tos and reviews older than about two months
- Listicles and comparisons, before they start slipping
- Docs, only when something actually changed
- News, almost never. Publish new instead.
If a page is dead, meaning the topic no longer matches what you sell, leave it alone or redirect it. Not every old post deserves effort.
Step 3: Write the diff before you edit
This is the step most people skip, and it's the heart of the method. Open a doc and list the changes as removals and additions, the way a diff would:
- Updated for 2024. Plans start at $29/month.
+ Updated for 2026. Plans start at $39/month.
- Step 4: Click Settings > Integrations.
+ Step 4: Click Settings > Connections (renamed in the March release).
- (no FAQ)
+ Added 4 FAQ entries from the prompts that currently cite competitors.
- Intro: 140 words of background before the answer.
+ Intro: direct answer in the first 80 words, background moved below.
Writing it out forces discipline. If your diff has 40 lines, you're probably doing a rewrite and should be honest about that. If it has 8 to 15, you're doing a proper refresh.
Step 5: Find what's missing, line by line
Stale facts are easy to spot. Missing coverage is harder. You need to know which questions AI models are answering that your page doesn't.
This is where content gap analysis earns its keep. Promptwatch maps your pages against the prompts AI answers and gives coverage scores, and its Content Refresh feature produces git-diff-style suggestions for existing pages, so the edits show up as additions and removals instead of a wholesale rewrite. You can also turn the prompts behind any citation into a content brief.
If you'd rather work from a traditional content editor, tools like Surfer SEO, Clearscope and MarketMuse all compare your draft against top results and flag missing terms and topics. They're built around Google SERPs more than AI answers, so treat their suggestions as one input.
Step 6: Make the edits, smallest first
Work through your diff in this order:
- Facts and numbers: prices, specs, statistics, version numbers, screenshots that show old UI
- The opening: answer the main question in the first 100 words. SEOptimer makes the same point, and it matches how AI systems tend to pull passages.
- Step lists and tables: make them accurate and easy to lift. Tables are cheap to update and easy for models to quote.
- New FAQ entries: short questions with direct answers
- Titles, meta descriptions and years: change the year only if the content truly reflects it
- Links: fix broken ones, add links to newer internal pages
Resist the urge to "improve" paragraphs that work. If a sentence is accurate, specific and readable, leave it. Sitebulb's guide describes a client refresh (HR Datahub) where updating the stats for 2025 moved the article to position 3 and got it cited in AI Overviews, Perplexity and ChatGPT. That's a facts-and-stats patch, not a rewrite.
Step 7: Handle dates and URLs honestly
There's a recurring debate about whether to bump the published date. My view: keep the URL, keep the original publication date visible if you want, and add a clear "Last updated" date that changes only when the content really changed. A Reddit thread on r/Blogging raises the worry that quietly editing without changing the date sends the weakest freshness signal, while readers who see an old date may skip the page before noticing the updates. Both concerns are fair. A visible updated date plus a short changelog solves both.
A simple changelog block at the bottom works well:
Updated November 2026: refreshed pricing, replaced two outdated screenshots,
added an FAQ section, and rewrote the intro to lead with the answer.
Don't create a new URL for the same topic and leave the old one behind. You split the history and the links.
Step 8: Make sure AI crawlers can actually see the change
A perfect refresh is worthless if the crawler hits an error. Check robots.txt, response codes and rendering. Promptwatch's IP-verified crawler logs show when GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others visit, what they read and what errors they hit. If you don't use it, a log-based tool like DarkVisitors can show AI agent traffic, and general crawlers such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb catch the technical basics.
Then request indexing in Search Console and, if you use one, update the sitemap's lastmod value.
Step 9: Measure the diff
Give it time. Check at 2 weeks, 4 weeks and 8 weeks against your baseline:
- Search Console: clicks, impressions, position
- AI citations: is the URL cited for more prompts, and does its position in the source list improve?
- AI referral traffic and conversions, if you track them
- Crawl frequency on the page
Not every refresh works. Blogr.ai's write-up makes the same point: treat each refresh as a tested change you measure, not a promise. When one flops, your diff tells you exactly what you changed, which makes the next attempt smarter.
Tooling for each part of the workflow
| Job | Options | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Find decaying pages | Google Search Console, Sitebulb, Promptwatch | Search Console is free; Promptwatch adds AI citation data |
| See which prompts cite a URL | Promptwatch, Profound, Peec AI | Check that the tool tracks real AI interfaces, not just APIs |
| Spot content gaps | Promptwatch, Surfer SEO, Clearscope, MarketMuse | Gap analysis against AI prompts versus Google SERPs |
| Diff-style edit suggestions | Promptwatch Content Refresh | Shows additions and removals against the existing page |
| Technical crawl checks | Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, Lumar | Broken links, orphan pages, response codes |
| AI crawler visibility | Promptwatch, DarkVisitors | Verify that bots reach the refreshed page |
If you want to compare more options in the category, the GEO software directory lists a wide range of AI visibility platforms.
A worked example
Say you run a SaaS blog with a how-to titled "How to set up SSO with Okta." It was published 14 months ago. It still ranks around position 9, but ChatGPT stopped citing it.
Your diff might look like this:
- Replace three screenshots showing the old admin UI
- Fix step 4 and step 7, where menu names changed
- Rewrite the intro so the first sentence says what SSO setup involves and how long it takes
- Add an FAQ: "Does this work on the free plan?", "How do I roll back?", "What if users can't log in after setup?"
- Update the year and the "tested on version" note
- Add two internal links to newer troubleshooting articles
That's seven changes. The page stays at the same URL, keeps its original structure, and you spent a couple of hours instead of a day. A how-to has a half-life of roughly 74 to 77 days in ChatGPT citations, so schedule the next look about two months out.
Common mistakes
- Changing only the year. Models and readers can tell when nothing else moved.
- Rewriting everything. You lose the parts that were working and can't attribute results.
- Refreshing news. It decays fastest, so publish something new instead.
- Skipping the baseline. Without a snapshot you can't tell whether the refresh helped.
- Ignoring crawlability. If AI bots hit errors, the update never gets seen.
- Fake freshness. Bumping the date with no real change is a short-term trick that erodes trust.
A repeatable cadence
Once the process works, put it on a calendar. A sensible rhythm: review how-tos, reviews and product pages every 60 days, landing, pricing and docs pages whenever a fact changes, comparisons and listicles quarterly, and everything else annually when the year changes. Keep the diffs in a shared sheet so the team can see what changed, why, and what happened afterward.
If you'd rather not run this by hand, agentic tools can do part of it. Promptwatch's Action Board flags listicles and guides that need a refresh before they fall out of citations, and its Content Agent can plan and publish updates to Webflow, Framer or WordPress with a review inbox in between. Other tools in the space, such as Frase and AirOps, handle content updating from different angles.
The core idea doesn't depend on any tool, though. Change the fewest lines that fix the most problems, write down what you changed, and check the result. That's all a diff is.