Source record
Should you add the year to blog posts? Yes. If yours say 2025, update them. LLMs search with the current year, so 2026 in your title = more citations...
This is your reminder to update all your blog titles that say 2025 to 2026. Let's talk about why this is so important and the right way to do it. First of all, if you're not already including the year in most of your blog titles, I highly recommend you start doing that.
This has always been an effective strategy for increasing click through rate in Google search results, which in turn can improve your rankings. However, with large language models, it's 10 times as effective. This is because when someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI A.
Question, it performs a series of searches, and in those searches, it's very common for large language models to include the current year. So if your blog title contains the current year and your competitor's blog title does not, the large language model will cite you by default. Also, both Google and ChatGPT prefer fresh content.
However, merely updating the year and publish date isn't enough to convince Google that your content is fresh. You'll actually need to update the content of the blog post. But you don't need to update it much.
My recommendation is just to add a short paragraph near the top of the article that says what has changed in 2026. So here's a simple trick for finding all the pages of your website that mentioned 2025. Go to Google and type site colon your domain name, space 2025.
This will show you every Page of your website in Google's search index with 2025 on the page, and it'll typically prioritise those with 2025 in the title. And one more tip never put the year in the URL. And that's because once a page starts receiving traffic, you never want to change the URL.
From Google's point of view, when you change the URL, you've removed that page and created a new page. If the URL already contains a year, you have a difficult decision to make. If the page is receiving a significant amount of traffic, I would leave the old year in.
Otherwise, I would recommend changing the URL, removing the year, and then setting up a redirect from the old URL to the new one.
Including the current year in blog titles can improve CTR and may help when LLM retrieval searches include the current year.
Refresh eligible evergreen pages with current-year titles only when the content itself is updated.
This source is connected to Freshness / year modifiers, Content refresh / AI search.
This is your reminder to update all your blog titles that say 2025 to 2026. Let's talk about why this is so important and the right way to do it. First of all, if you're not already including the year in most of your blog titles, I highly recommend you start doing that...