B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Current
25.7%
25.7% -- average freshness advantage of ai cited urls vs organic ranking urls for AI search citations vs organic search rankings (2026)
URLs cited in AI search results are on average 25.7% fresher than URLs ranking in traditional organic search.
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Lighthouse Research Team
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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
Digitaloft
Primary
Tier B
https://wordpattern.org/blogs/how-to-refresh-outdated-statistics-stats-for-better-rankings/ ↗
Source Article
Success in SEO isn’t just about what you publish today; it’s about how well you maintain what you published yesterday. Many site owners notice a mysterious drop in rankings for their best-performing articles. This phenomenon is known as content decay, and it is often driven by one specific culprit: …
Original Research
Digitaloft
· Original study ↗
Methodology
Digitaloft research
Methodology documented
Segmentation
Industrymarketing
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Plain Text
AI search citations vs organic search rankings: 25.7% average freshness advantage of ai cited urls vs organic ranking urls. Source: Digitaloft (2026). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/ai-cited-urls-fresher-25-7
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<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/ai-cited-urls-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> -- average freshness advantage of ai cited urls vs organic ranking urls for AI search citations vs organic search rankings<br><small>Source: Digitaloft (2026) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/ai-cited-urls-fresher-25-7" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
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