Temporal Authority: When Update Frequency Matters for Content Evidence
SiteNexis Temporal Authority evaluates freshness, semantic drift, and authority velocity. Update cadence matters differently by topic and content type; the framework is not a universal AI-provider trust signal.
In traditional SEO, content freshness matters for certain query types — news, current events, and time-sensitive searches. SiteNexis extends that review by asking whether content remains temporally appropriate for the topic. Its Temporal Authority framework models freshness, semantic drift, and change history; it does not claim that every AI provider applies one shared trust rule.
Authority Velocity
Authority velocity is the rate at which your AI-visible authority is growing or declining across consecutive audits. We compute delta on three metrics: Entity Confidence Score, Citation Probability Score, and External Validation signal count. A domain where Entity Confidence increased from 54 to 68 between audits, Citation Probability increased from 61 to 74, and two new sameAs validations resolved has strongly positive velocity. A domain where all three declined has negative velocity — a warning that the content or entity infrastructure is degrading.
●Authority Velocity requires a minimum of two audits to compute. On first audit, SiteNexis returns a baseline record with velocity: null and status: baseline_established. Run a second audit after making improvements to see velocity scores.
Semantic Drift Detection
Semantic drift occurs when a page's content changes meaning over time — shifting from one topic cluster to another without a canonical redirect, or gradually drifting away from its original entity anchor. SiteNexis detects drift by comparing embedding cosine similarity between page-body snapshots from consecutive audits. A page that moves from "machine trust modeling" toward "general SEO tips" receives a higher diagnostic drift signal; the result is an interpretation of the inspected history, not a claim about a provider's accumulated model.
Trust Decay Modeling
SiteNexis's current freshness analysis uses dateModified/datePublished when available, falls back to crawl timing, and applies content-type thresholds: product pages 90 days, articles 180 days, evergreen pages 365 days, and 180 days by default. These are current SiteNexis model parameters, not provider thresholds. A product page with pricing data may need review sooner than an evergreen methodology post; topic and content type matter.
Update Frequency Classification
SiteNexis classifies observed page ages into four states: active (median age up to 7 days), periodic (up to 30 days), stale (up to 180 days), and abandoned (older than 180 days). Classification currently uses schema dates, crawl timing, and content-type thresholds in the freshness analyzer. Stale and abandoned states lower the SiteNexis temporal diagnostic; they do not prove that every provider progressively down-weights the content.
Content Freshness Impact Factor
Not all content decays at the same rate. We tag claims containing dates, statistics, version numbers, and pricing as time-sensitive. Time-sensitive claims on stale pages carry a freshness penalty in the Temporal Authority calculation. A page claiming "as of 2023" with no update since then has high freshness penalty. A page claiming "this methodology has three phases" with no time-sensitive data has near-zero freshness penalty. Evergreen structural content is treated differently from data-containing content.