Profound launches Citation Decay: half of AI search citations are under 13 weeks old

gaganghotra_ · x · 2026-08-16

AI SEO practitioner Gagan Ghotra flagged a new concept from AEO platform Profound — Citation Decay — calling it another new development in the AI SEO landscape.

Profound notes that half of the content cited by Answer Engines is less than 13 weeks old, so staying visible in AI answers requires constant refreshing. The new feature plots a citation curve for every cited URL, tracking week-over-week citation counts from the first week the URL appeared in an AI answer. For each URL it reports:

The goal is to let teams decide when a page actually needs a refresh based on data, instead of running updates on an arbitrary cadence or publish date while the page that truly needed attention sits untouched for another quarter.

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