Research · Scheduled study
Citation freshness in professional-services queries
Scheduled study. Ahrefs reported in July 2025 that AI-cited URLs were about 25.7 percent fresher than organic results across 16.975 million citations. This quarterly study asks whether the same holds in professional-services queries specifically: for a fixed prompt set across legal, medical, financial and technical categories, the stated publication and revision dates of cited pages are compared with those of organically ranked pages, by engine and by category. Publication date will be announced on this page.
Status: Scheduled; publication date will be announced on this page · Cadence: quarterly
Research question
What the study will answer.
In professional-services queries, are the pages answer engines cite more recently published or revised than the pages ranked organically for the same queries, by how much, and does the gap differ by engine and category?
Planned method
How it will be done.
- Prompt set across professional-services categories run repeatedly across named engines; cited URLs recorded per prompt and engine.
- Organic results for the same queries recorded from search.
- Publication and revision dates taken from each page’s visible dates and structured data; pages with no stated date recorded as such and reported separately.
- Comparison of date distributions between cited and organically ranked pages by engine and category, with the share of undated pages stated.
Why it matters
Who will use the number.
Freshness is a planning assumption behind every refresh cycle. A category-specific measurement with a stated method tells firms whether, and how much, currency matters for their prompts.
Participate
How to take part.
Not applicable; the study uses public pages. Questions about the method may be sent through the contact page.
By David Selakovic · Published 2026-10-16 · Revised 2026-10-16 · Reviewed every 90 days