Outdated AI information does not look outdated. It looks confident.

Training data ends somewhere, and everything after that point is either missing or inferred. The model does not experience this as a gap. It answers in the present tense because the present tense is what the training text used.

So a draft can be entirely true of the world eighteen months ago and wrong about today, without a single internal inconsistency to warn you. There is no tense marker, no footnote, no hesitation.

The practical consequence: recency is not something to check after the fact, it is something to build into the claim. Anything that can change needs the date it was true written beside it.

Some information has a short shelf life and always has. These are the categories to treat as volatile by default.

The opposite error is common enough to name: a page is updated with the newest figure and loses the qualification that made the old one usable. A revenue number without its period, a benchmark without its workload, a legal rule without its jurisdiction.

Freshness is a property of the whole claim, not of the numeral. Replacing 2023 with 2024 while keeping a footnote that described 2023 produces a page that is newer and wrong.

Update the source, the scope and the date together, or leave the claim and mark it as historical.

Unversioned present tense is the tell. Currently, right now, the latest version, modern teams, today's tooling, with no release or date anywhere near them.

Second tell: a product described as a monolith of features when it has since split into modules, or a service described as free when it now has a paid tier. The prose is fluent and the nouns are out of date.

Third: comparisons against competitors that have changed. The page still claims a gap that closed a year ago, which is the kind of staleness that damages a brand when a prospect knows more than the page does.

Two words fix most of this: as of, followed by a date. Prices, limits, version support, legal thresholds. It costs a line and it converts an absolute claim into a dated observation.

Add the source beside the date. The pair is what makes a claim maintainable: the next person can open the source, see whether it still says the same thing, and update the date if it does.

Reserve absolute present-tense claims for things that genuinely do not change: mathematical relationships, physical constants, definitions. Everything else gets a stamp.

Code documentation ages faster than any other format. An endpoint renamed in a minor release turns a helpful page into a source of failed builds.

Pin the version in the heading and the body: this page describes 4.x. Add a supported-versions table, and a short note on what changed in the last major release. Readers arrive with a version in mind, and the page should tell them immediately whether it applies.

Where behaviour differs by version, say so in the same paragraph as the instruction rather than in a changelog nobody reads. Documentation errors are expensive because they get copied into other people's code.

Not every page deserves the same schedule. A pricing page needs checking monthly. A legal explainer needs checking when the rule changes, which requires a watch on the source rather than a calendar entry.

A conceptual guide can go years without edits if it avoids specifics. The moment it adds a version number or a price, it inherits the volatility of that fact.

Write the cadence down per template, and put the owner's name beside it. A refresh policy without an owner becomes a wish, and pages rot quietly in the gap between two teams that each assume the other is watching.

Search the page for the markers: currently, latest, new, now, currently supports, as of. Each hit is a claim that either has a date or needs one.

Then check the volatile specifics: every numeral, version, price and legal reference. One source each, reopened rather than remembered, because remembering is exactly what produced the staleness.

Finally, check the names. Renamed products and acquired companies leave pages describing a market that no longer has the same participants, and that is invisible unless someone looks at the entities deliberately.

A page audit asks whether the page describes anything volatile without a date. A source audit asks whether the thing the page points at has changed since the date attached to it. The first is quick and the second is the one that actually keeps a page true.

Run the page audit whenever a template is reused, because a page cloned from last year's version inherits last year's facts along with its structure. Search for the year, the version number and the price, and replace all three or none.

Run the source audit on a schedule tied to the claim's volatility rather than the page's age. Pricing sources weekly, version support monthly, legal thresholds whenever the regulator publishes. Put a link to the source in the page's internal notes so the next person starts where the last one finished.

Two audits, two owners, two dates: the pair is what stops a page quietly becoming historical while still being presented as current. One audit alone leaves exactly the gap where the most expensive staleness lives.

Sometimes the right answer is to keep the page and label it. An archived guide with a clear as-of date and a note that a newer version exists is useful and honest.

What damages trust is the silent mixing: a page updated in one paragraph and left alone in another, so the reader cannot tell which part is current. Pick a state for the whole page, current or historical, and make it visible.

If a page describes a product you no longer sell, redirect it or mark it retired. A stale page that keeps ranking is a permanent source of confused support requests.

Ask what date this page describes, and whether that date is stated. If you cannot answer from the page itself, neither can a reader, and a reader who cannot date a claim will discount all of it.

That is the argument for treating freshness as part of accuracy rather than as housekeeping. A page is not correct in the abstract; it is correct about a world at a time.