No Date = No AI Love. The End of Evergreen Content! Jay’s SCOOP | Ep. 423

0:00Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast from marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This, Not That podcast presented by Marigold. And once again, marketing has taken everything that we know and has put it into like a snow globe and shaken it up and things are all changing again. What am I talking about? So forever, whether you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer, evergreen content, evergreen offers have been great. They would just always be there for us.

0:39They would always work. And what is that? If you don't know what evergreen is, it's content that's good all the time, right? If I put out a piece of content that says the best subject line formulas, and that was the name of the content, it could sit on my website for the next three years and it would still look like it's okay to do whatever on the consumer side, how to tie a tie, right? It is content that just can sit there and it's great. And it would get a lot of engagement. It would get, and all the different search queries, it would always show up in Google. Evergreen content, evergreen offers would do incredibly well, but the game has changed radically.

1:19Why? Because now everyone's going to different AI tools. Okay. We're going to all the LLMs, the large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, and all of them. And what do all these models want? They want recency. They want stuff that's not only new, but is also labeled as being new. So here's some stats, and then we'll get into exactly what you need to be doing with your consumer offers, with your business content. Because if you don't do this, you are going to lose a ton of business, a ton of traffic because the game has changed dramatically. So first off, ChatGPT citations. So when you ask ChatGPT something, okay, and it says, gives you an answer and the answer has a source or whatever, ChatGPT citations are 393 days newer than those in organic search results.

2:13What does that mean in English? That means what ChatGPT is doing is pulling content and offers and information that is more recent than what Google is out there looking for to put in its search results. All right. Now, according to AROPS, pages not updated, a website page not updated in over a year are more than two times as unlikely to be cited by AI, meaning that it's not just about the content that we're going to talk about in a minute, but on your website, if the pages themselves are not getting updated continuously, then the AI tools are not going to go to those pages and pull from them. This idea of set it and forget it in our marketing, whether it's evergreen content or different resource stuff that's just sitting there, if you think that you could just do that and you're going to be okay, you could have a website that's pretty good, it's fine, and you're not updating those pages, you are in massive trouble.

3:11So here's the wild stat. Content and offers that include a recent time period have over a 50 % higher average likelihood of showing up in the results on LLMs such as ChatGPT. Meaning, okay, if your content in its title says the date of some kind, I'll give you examples, you have a massive advantage in getting your stuff to show up when people are going to all the AI tools to ask it for stuff. And if you don't think it's important, listen, a billion people a week are going to ChatGPT alone and asking it stuff. That's where it's happening. And this also applies on Google because on Google now with Gemini and they're giving their AI results, okay, the same applies there.

3:58You have to get your mind out of the old search engine game. It is no longer what it means. All right. So what does this mean in practical terms? So let's give you some business-to-business examples, and I'll give you some consumer examples. So if you're going to go out there and put out the, you know, the SaaS pricing report, this is your content piece that you're promoting you want people to download. Instead of the SaaS pricing report, it has to say the 2025 Q4 SaaS pricing benchmark or benchmark report, whatever. You want to include not only the year, but if you can, include the quarter or include the month, the more timely your content is, okay, the more it's going to get picked up by all these different models.

4:41Now, let's say it's not this quarterly report, whatever, all that. What you can throw into any piece of content on the business side is you could say updated October, 2025. So if it's the 2025 cybersecurity threat report, tag on there, add on to it, updated October, 2025. Because when you say updated, that is a signal to all the AI models. Ooh, let's grab this thing. And you actually, as you're going to 2026, when you think about your content, you want to be thinking about content you'd be putting out there that is labeled with the quarter, the month, the whatever. All right. And this is for your webinar titles, for your podcast titles, for contents being downloaded, whatever it is, you need to add that super tight time period because this is how you're going to show up more.

5:30Now, the consumer side, it's the same thing. You can't go out there and just be like having content that says, the best TVs. No, that's the best TVs updated October 2025. Instead of the style guide, it's the winter 2025 style guide. Instead of a gift guide, it is holiday 2025 gift guide. You need to help all the AI tools find what it is that you're putting out there. And what they're looking for is recency. And we see that in all of their citations. It is a much tighter window of what they're looking for as compared to what Google has been looking for in their search forever. I mean, to give you an idea, Ahrefs analyzed 17 million citations made by the various AI tools, Chatsubut, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google's AI overviews.

6:23And it found that AI citations are 364 days more recent, meaning that's in comparison to regular search. And it's more recent because they're pulling all the stuff with the dates that we just went through. So whether it's your consumer offers, your consumer content, your nonprofit offers, your B2B offers, whatever it is, you need to be thinking about this evergreen stuff taking a back seat. All right, let's get into, since you didn't ask, the ridiculous portion of this podcast. What's going on? Well, randomness. First off, I don't know about you all, but I cannot believe it. I have a couple of neighbors who have put up Halloween decorations already.

7:04This is ridiculous. I mean, I'm fine. You want to put it up one week before? You want to put your Halloween decorations full-blown? I'm not talking about a pumpkin. You want to put a pumpkin outside your house fine don't care you want to put up one little skeleton fine don't care i'm talking about i got a couple neighbors that have put up full-blown like halloween's tomorrow level decorations to me that's one week out maybe 10 days other than that it's ridiculous what are we doing stop uh speaking about other things that are coming out so i'm very excited below deck Mediterranean is now out. I'm very excited about that.

7:42And Love is Blind season nine is out. Listen, let me tell you something. This is not me being promotional, but I'm going to tell you something cool that we haven't announced. So Love is Blind is a show, a dating show, people can't see each other, whatever. And it's hosted by Nick and Vanessa Lachey. Now, Nick Lachey, as many of you probably know, he was the lead singer of 98 Degrees, which was a great band back in the 90s and 2000. Guess what? Because our Guru Conference, our virtual free email marketing event, has a theme this year, 90s, 2000s. We got Nick Lachey is going to be there live and he's going to be judging a karaoke contest where we are going to be singing 90s and 2000 songs.

8:24Nick Lachey is going to be there. That's wild. Oh, these events we put on are out of control. Anyway, got to register for that thing. It's free, guruconference.com. What else is going on? I don't know what's going on. I hope you're doing great. Keeping it real. Appreciate you. And I'll see you at the next one. You did it. You made it to the end. But wait, the party is not over. Listen, I want to keep hanging out. Subscribe to this podcast. And if it wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, give it a five-star review. Why not? But you know what? I want to do even more with you. Go to gurumediahub.com and we can partner there.

9:01You can find out about all of our free events, all of our stuff. and if you're epically bored, go to jschwedelson.com and we could stay connected. You could find my newsletter and everything else I got going on. Thanks for being here and hope you subscribe.