Citations are a key lever for controlling your narrative in AI Search, and half of the content Answer Engines cite is less than 13 weeks old. Staying in the answer means refreshing constantly. But when does a citation stop earning its place?

The Citation Decay view in Answer Engine Insights answers that. Refresh decisions usually run on an arbitrary cadence or a publish date, so the page that actually needed updating sits untouched for another quarter. Citation Decay plots a citation curve for every URL, so you can see the full life of a page's citations and the point where it needs a refresh.

What Citation Decay shows

Every day, we check how much of the AI conversation each page is winning. That's its citation share: the percentage of citations it's getting that day, out of all citations across the AI models we track. We track this on a rolling two-week average, because raw daily numbers can create noisy readouts.

Once we have that smoothed trend, we can answer the questions that actually matter: When did a page first get cited? How fast did it catch on? When did it peak? And how quickly is it fading (its half-life)?

First cited date, rise, and peak

The first cited date is the first day an Answer Engine cited the page. The peak is the highest point of the page's citation share, and the peak date is the first day it got there. The rise is the number of days between the first cited date and the peak date: a short rise means a page got popular fast, a long rise means it built up citations slowly.

Half-life

Half-life is the number of days it takes for a page's citation share to drop from the peak to half of the peak citation share, and stay there. A page only counts as decayed once its smoothed share falls to or below that threshold and holds there for 14 straight days through to today, with no bounce back above the threshold in between. A page that rose for 45 days and then had a 10-day half-life climbed steadily and then shed its relevance fast.

You can filter the view to owned domains or all domains, and by model, to see whether a page decayed everywhere or only inside a specific engine.

Not every page gets scored

To keep the numbers meaningful, Citation Decay only scores pages, domains, or root domains that clear four bars: the page has been live and citable for at least 28 days, it's picked up at least 5 citations total in the window, it actually reached a peak share above zero, and its peak 14-day window includes at least 5 raw citations. Pages that are too new, too rarely cited, or never really took off get left out of the averages entirely.

How Profound customers can use this

Until now, this decay was invisible. This metric provides a data-backed content refresh queue: the pages worth an update this week are the ones whose citation share is already falling toward half its peak, not the ones that happen to be oldest.

Time your refreshes to the curve instead of the calendar

Most content teams refresh on a fixed cadence, which wastes time on pages that didn't need it and misses the ones that went stale within weeks of publishing. Sort your owned pages by half-life instead and work the queue from the top: past peak, falling fastest, still worth ranking for.

Find which formats decay fastest

Analyze your cited pages by page type and compare half-lives across product pages, comparison pages, glossary entries, and launch posts. Formats with long rises and long half-lives are worth producing more of. Formats that decay in a couple of weeks need either a higher publishing rate or a different approach.

Build a refresh pipeline with your AI Marketer

Pull the owned pages that are past peak and have your AI Marketer draft updated versions and stage the revisions in your CMS. Decay becomes a trigger instead of something you notice a quarter late.

Get started

Citation Decay is available today for Profound customers, under the Citation view within Answer Engine Insights. If you’d like access, please reach out to your Profound team.

If you are not yet a Profound customer and want to see this in action, we encourage you to get a demo.