Your website's informational content ages faster than the site itself

A website's design can last for years without looking old. What the site says cannot. FAQ pages, blog posts, and guides go stale one fact at a time, and the first things to expire are the ones that depend on someone else: other companies' prices, product names, features a platform retires, and statistics borrowed from third parties. I checked this on my own site: I reviewed its 55 FAQ answers and 34 of them needed changes, one of them about my own offer. This matters more now than it used to, because what a site publishes is no longer read only by people. AI assistants read it too, and sometimes the site's own chat repeats it word for word.

Key points

• What goes stale fastest on a website is not the design. It is the third-party facts the text takes for granted.
• A mistake on an informational page no longer stays there. An AI assistant can cite it, and a chat that answers from the site's content repeats it.
• Keeping it current does not mean rewriting everything. It means knowing what facts each page holds, where they came from, and when they were last checked.

What I found in my own FAQ

My site has two sets of frequently asked questions: 15 about how Senda Lógica works and 40 broader ones about web development, SEO, pricing, and integrations. I wrote them with sources and reviewed them when they went live. The last update was at the end of August.

In October I went through them one by one, against the site's own catalogue and against the original sources. Of the 55 answers, 34 needed changes. Almost every problem was in someone else's facts:

• a free plan that had been cut in half;
• the name of a search bot that no longer goes by that name;
• a Google feature that had stopped showing five months earlier;
• statistics circulating under the name of a source that does not say them.

The mistake that mattered most to me was about my own offer. At the end of September I added a monthly plan for the site's consultation assistant, and the answer about what happens to that assistant after the three months of included support still described how things worked before that plan existed. Nobody had touched it because nothing was broken: it was well written, the tone was right, and it was no longer true.

What goes stale first

Not all content ages at the same speed. An explanation of what an API is stays useful for years. What expires quickly has a recognizable shape.

Other companies' prices and limits. My FAQ said Mailchimp's free plan went up to 500 contacts. Today it goes up to 250 contacts. Nobody announces when a pricing table changes: it just changes.

Names of products, plans, and bots. The answer about preparing a site for AI search engines recommended allowing an Anthropic bot under a name the company no longer uses, and treated as one the bots OpenAI splits by purpose: one to train models and another for its search. The underlying advice was still good, but followed to the letter it did not work.

Features a platform retires or changes. Google stopped showing expandable FAQ results in search on May 7, 2026, and my answer about structured data still listed them as a benefit. Meta, for its part, has charged for the WhatsApp API per template message since July 1, 2025, and my answer still talked about a per-conversation fee.

Statistics with a borrowed source. This is the most uncomfortable one. A figure about how many searches have local intent was attributed to a 2025 study I could not find anywhere. Another was attributed to studies from an industry publication that I could not find either. I did not make up either one: I took them from places that repeated them with confidence. That is the problem. A figure repeated often enough looks verified.

Your own offer. This is the one people least expect, because you know your business. But an offer changes more often than the pages that explain it: a new plan, an adjusted price, a service you stop providing. If the FAQ was written before that, it says what was true before.

Why it matters more now

Until recently, an outdated fact on an informational page had a limited cost: one person read it, maybe noticed, maybe not. Three things changed that.

The first is that AI assistants cite. When someone asks a question in an AI search engine, the answer is assembled from fragments of pages. An outdated fact on your site can end up in that answer with your name next to it.

The second is that many sites now have a chat that answers from their own content. The one on my site reads the FAQ answers and returns them verbatim. While the answer about the assistant's plan was out of date, anyone who asked would have received the old version, delivered with complete confidence.

The third is that the value of an FAQ has moved. For years, marking up FAQs with structured data made Google show them expanded in search results. That is over. What remains is that the answer is correct, because that is what makes it worth citing.

How to keep it current without rewriting everything

The fix is not to review everything every month. It is knowing what to review and when.

Keep a record of third-party facts. On my site's blog, every figure that comes from someone else has an entry: what it says, where it comes from, how old the data is, when it was last checked, and how quickly it tends to change. An automated test fails if an article publishes a percentage that is not in that record, or if a recorded figure loses its source. The FAQ had nothing like it, and that is exactly where the mistakes piled up. For a site with no code behind it, a four-column spreadsheet is enough: fact, source, date, and next review.

Remove what you cannot back up. When a figure has no source, the most honest move is almost always to drop it and keep the idea. "Takes considerably longer" says less than "takes six to twelve months", but it does not become false over time.

Review by how fast the fact changes, not by the calendar. Prices and plan limits change several times a year; product names, once or twice; concepts, almost never. It makes sense to check the first group every three months and the rest once a year.

Make the update date real. A visible "last updated" date helps, as long as it matches a real review. Changing it without reviewing the content is worse than not having one, because it tells readers, and any system that reads the page, that the text is current when it is not.

When your offer changes, find where you explain it. A new plan is not finished when its listing goes live. It is finished when you have reviewed every page that described what came before: FAQs, guides, and sales copy.

A short checklist for your site

• Find every third-party price your site publishes and compare it with the official page.
• Find the names of products, plans, and tools, and confirm they still exist under that name.
• Find every statistic and open its source. If the source does not say that figure, remove it.
• Read the answers about your own offer as if you were a new client: do they match what you sell today?
• If your site has a chat that answers from its content, ask it the questions your clients ask you and check what it says.
• Give every informational page a next-review date.

FAQ

How often should a website's FAQ be reviewed?

It depends on the facts it holds. Answers with other companies' prices or limits are worth checking every three months, and those that explain concepts, once a year. And always whenever your own offer changes.

Is outdated content bad for SEO?

An outdated fact will not sink a site overnight, but it lowers its value as a source. AI search engines build their answers from fragments of pages, and a page with old facts is less useful to cite. Readers who spot one mistake also stop trusting the rest.

Is FAQ structured data still worth adding?

Yes, as a description of the content: it tells any system what each question and answer is. What it no longer gets you is the expandable result in Google, which stopped showing in May 2026.

Should I remove every figure from my site?

No. Figures with a clear source and a date help. The ones worth removing are those with no source, or those nobody is going to review. A figure you cannot back up today will not be in better shape a year from now.

Closing

A site can look flawless and still say things that are no longer true. Reviewing my own FAQ showed me that the problem was not what I had written wrong, but what I had stopped looking at. This article has a date too: its examples are from October 2026 and they will age like everything else. If you want someone to review the informational content on your site, you can reach me through sendalogica.com.

Sources

1. Google Search Central — FAQ (FAQPage) structured data, changelog entries for May and June 2026 https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/faqpage
2. Meta — WhatsApp Business Platform: pricing https://developers.facebook.com/documentation/business-messaging/whatsapp/pricing
3. Mailchimp — Pricing https://mailchimp.com/pricing/marketing/
4. Anthropic — Anthropic's crawlers (ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, and Claude-User) https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-what-is-claude-bot
5. OpenAI — Overview of OpenAI crawlers https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots