B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Current
25.7%
25.7% -- content freshness difference ai cited vs organic for AI assistants (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity) (2026)
Content cited by AI assistants is on average 25.7% fresher than organic search results.
Attribution:
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Lighthouse Research Team
Last verified:
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Source verified
Evidence graded
Value
25.7%
Unit
Percentage
Data Vintage
2026
Entity
Evidence Quality
B
Strong, reliable evidence
Sourced from a well-regarded research firm or industry leader with transparent methodology and a reasonably large sample.
Single source - not yet corroborated
Score breakdown
Extraction
75
Source Trust
60
Citation Chain
20
Independence
30
Methodology
45
Freshness
95
Source
Ahrefs
Primary
Tier B
https://wordpattern.org/blogs/content-decay-and-how-to-fix-it/ ↗
Source Article
You published a solid article. It ranked. Traffic came in. Then, slowly and quietly, it started slipping. You didn’t change anything, but Google did, your competitors did, and your readers did.
That’s content decay: the gradual, often invisible decline of a page’s organic traffic and rankings, with …
Original Research
Ahrefs
· Original study ↗
Methodology
Ahrefs study comparing freshness of AI-cited content vs organic search results
Methodology documented
Segmentation
Industrymarketing
Cite this stat
Plain Text
AI assistants (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity): 25.7% content freshness difference ai cited vs organic. Source: Ahrefs (2026). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/ai-cited-content-fresher-25-7
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<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/ai-cited-content-fresher-25-7" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>25.7%</strong> -- content freshness difference ai cited vs organic for AI assistants (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity)<br><small>Source: Ahrefs (2026) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/ai-cited-content-fresher-25-7" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
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