AEO Page Audit: AI Is Still Citing Your Old Pages
Year-end promotions are just around the corner, and many business owners are busy brainstorming new campaigns and writing fresh copy. But a few recent studies point to something more basic: when AI answers customer questions, it often uses the "old page" on your website as the answer.
So this post is about an AEO page audit: instead of rushing to write new content, start by cleaning up the pages AI is already reading and already citing.
Today's Highlights: AEO Page Audit — Which Pages Is AI Actually Citing?
The bottom line first: the pages AI cites are mostly pages that were "updated" within the past year, not necessarily newly written ones. And AI often cites pages like customer service and announcements, which the marketing team usually doesn't manage.
Old pages don't retire on their own
U.S. SEO platform BrightEdge published an analysis on October 8 that tracked 13,915 holiday-shopping-related ChatGPT prompts across six large U.S. retailers (June to August 2026). About 1 in 10 cited an old page with a past year in its URL, and that's an underestimate. More interesting still: among high-volume prompts that cited last year's promotion announcements, 9 in 10 didn't mention a year at all. Customers were simply asking about this year's deals, and AI answered with last year's press release.
At two of the retailers, dated press releases captured 60% to 70% of Black Friday-related citations, while evergreen promotion pages got only a little over 10%. By contrast, Best Buy consolidated its content on a single promotion hub with a fixed URL, and that one page alone earned about 37.6% of citations.
Customer service and announcement pages matter more than you think
In another analysis published October 16, BrightEdge compared the citation sources of Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT. On Google, commercial pages such as product pages accounted for about 64.6% of citations; on ChatGPT, press releases, shopping guides, and customer service policy pages together made up about 64.5%, with customer service and policy pages carrying 12.5 times the share they have on Google. In other words, about half of ChatGPT's citations land on pages owned by PR and customer service. One reason is that ChatGPT prompts read more like full sentences, and many are practical questions about shipping, returns, and exchanges.
"Maintained" matters more than "new"
Seer Interactive's content freshness study, published in July, is a bit older but uses a more thorough methodology, which makes it useful background. They analyzed 7,683 pages cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, totaling 47,097 citations, and found that 75% of cited pages had been updated within the past year. Among pages where both publish and update dates could be compared, about 72% had been updated within a year, but only 42% had been newly published within a year. In other words, many of the cited pages are actually old pages that someone has kept looking after.
Google's official position
Google is clear in its official documentation: to appear in AI summaries, you don't need special optimization or any new AI-specific files. Pages need to be indexable, important content should be presented as text, structured data should match what's visible on the page, and business information should be kept up to date. That lines up with the studies above: getting the fundamentals right matters more than chasing new tricks.
Limitations to keep in mind
BrightEdge's data comes from its own tools and a sample of large U.S. retailers, and the research looks only at "citations," not clicks or revenue. Use it as directional guidance, not a guarantee.
Jesse's Take: Fix Old Pages Before Writing New Ones
After reading these reports, the first thing that came to mind was the websites of many small and midsize businesses in Taiwan: business hours from three years ago, shipping rules still stuck before the pandemic, the latest deals posted only on their LINE Official Account (LINE is Taiwan's dominant messaging app) and Facebook, and a "Latest News" section last updated for the Mid-Autumn Festival a year ago. Customers increasingly ask AI directly, AI answers with this outdated information, and you have no idea it's happening.
Tip 1: Start with the pages customers ask about
You don't need to overhaul the whole site at once. Start by listing the five things customers ask about most: business hours, pricing or how quotes work, shipping and lead times, returns and exchanges, and contact information. A common scenario: a small handmade soap brand had its return policy written in an announcement from three years ago. The policy later changed, but the change was only explained in LINE replies, so AI may still answer customers based on the old rules. Make sure these pages are current, and that the information is written in the page text, not just in images or PDFs.
Tip 2: One topic, one evergreen page
If you open a new page for every seasonal campaign and never deal with the old ones, AI ends up picking a page at random from a pile of versions. A better approach is to create a "Promotions Overview" or "FAQ" page with a fixed URL and simply update its content each year. You don't need to delete old announcements, but add a line at the top saying "This promotion has ended" and link to the latest information.
Tip 3: Move your customer service knowledge onto your website
Research shows ChatGPT loves citing customer service and policy pages. Yet at many companies, the real customer service knowledge is scattered across LINE chats, Excel files, and the owner's head. Turning the questions your customer service team answers most each week into a one-question-one-answer FAQ page is AEO at its most practical.
A word of honesty, though: most of these studies come from companies that sell SEO tools or services, and the samples are large U.S. retailers, so some selection bias is inevitable, and the findings may not translate directly to small Taiwanese companies. But keeping your website information accurate and up to date is something you should be doing anyway, AI or not.
A first step you can take today
Open ChatGPT or Gemini and, in a customer's voice, ask three questions about your company, such as "Are you open on weekends?" or "How do I return an item?" See which page the answer cites and whether the information is correct. If it's wrong, start fixing from that page.
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