How Often Should a Law Firm Refresh Its Pages? Freshness, Dates and AI Citations
AI engines and Google both prefer a page that was checked recently over one that was not, and they read the date to decide. For a law firm the rule is by page type: cost and figure pages quarterly, process and courthouse pages twice a year, evergreen explainers annually, and anything with a changed law the week it changes. What 'refresh' means (not republishing), how to show the date, and what we see in the citation logs when a page goes stale.
Short answer: Refresh by page type, not by calendar. Pages with figures in them (costs, filing fees, thresholds, timelines) every quarter, because the figures change. Process and courthouse pages twice a year, because departments and procedures move. Evergreen explainers once a year. Anything affected by a law change, the week it takes effect. A refresh means the content was checked and corrected and the visible "last updated" date reflects that; it does not mean changing the date on an unchanged page, which the engines detect and which reads as what it is. In our logs, pages with a stale date lose citations to fresher competitors on the same question within a few months.
Why does freshness matter more for legal pages?
Because the answers change. The small-estate threshold changed in April 2025. PAGA changed in July 2024. Filing fees change with the court's fee schedule. Departments move between floors. A page that says "the limit is $184,500" is wrong, and a system that can see the date knows it is more likely to be wrong than a page dated last month.
The AI engines are explicit about this in their behavior: for questions with a time-sensitive answer they favor recent sources, and several show the source's date in the citation. Google's own systems have treated freshness as a query-dependent signal for over a decade. For legal process and cost questions, it is on.
What counts as a refresh?
- Re-reading the page against the current law, fee schedule and court practice.
- Correcting figures, dates, department numbers, names.
- Updating the "checked on" or "last updated" line to today, and the
dateModifiedin the page'sArticleorWebPagemarkup. - Optionally, adding what has changed since the last version.
What does not count: changing the date and nothing else; republishing the page at a new URL; rewriting the introduction to "2026" while leaving the body's figures from 2023.
What is the schedule?
| Page type | Refresh | What usually changes |
|---|---|---|
| Cost pages (trust cost, divorce cost, DUI defense cost) | Quarterly | Fee ranges, court filing fees, what is included |
| Threshold and figure pages (small estate, Medi-Cal, support guideline) | Quarterly, and on the day a figure changes | The figure |
| Courthouse pages | Twice a year | Departments, hours, parking, remote appearance rules |
| Process pages (what happens at arraignment, probate steps) | Twice a year | Procedure, forms, timelines |
| Practice and matter overview pages | Annually | Attorney list, matters handled, links |
| Evergreen explainers (what is a living trust) | Annually | Little; confirm and re-date |
| Law-change pages (AB 2016, PAGA reform) | The week the law changes, then quarterly | The law |
| Attorney profiles | On any change | Bar status, memberships, matters |
A firm with sixty pages has a refresh task most weeks. It is a few hours a month, and it is the difference between a site that is cited and one that was.
How should the date be shown?
Visibly, near the top or bottom of the page, as "Last updated [Month Day, Year]" or "Checked on [date]", and in the structured data as dateModified. Both. The visible date is what a reader and a summarizer see; the markup is what a crawler reads. They must agree. A dateModified that changes daily while the visible text says 2023 is a pattern search systems associate with manipulation.
For blog posts, keep the original publication date and add an updated date when the content is revised. Readers and engines both prefer knowing when a piece was written and when it was last true.
What happens when a page goes stale?
From our citation logs, in words: a firm's cost page is cited for "how much does a living trust cost in Los Angeles" through a year; a competitor publishes a page with the same structure and a current date; over the next two or three months the competitor's page replaces the firm's in the AI answers for that question, and the firm's page slides in the classic results. The firm's page was not wrong; it was older, and the systems could see it.
The recovery is a real refresh, and it usually recovers within a similar period.
What does not work?
- Date-only updates. The engines compare content versions.
- A site-wide "updated 2026" footer. Not a page date; ignored.
- Republishing old posts as new with a new URL. Loses the old URL's history and reads as duplication.
- Refreshing everything every month. Unnecessary and, if the dates change without edits, harmful.
How do you manage it?
A sheet with one row per page: type, last refreshed, next due, owner. Sort by next due; work the top. The content strategy service includes the refresh schedule for the pages it writes, and the free visibility check reports the visible and structured dates on the firm's key pages and flags the ones that are stale or disagree. The reasoning about which pages get cited, and why fresher ones win, is in the GEO for law firms guide.
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