Google's Jeff Dean, the lead of Google AI and a Google veteran since 1999, highlighted Google's index freshness as one of its key advantages in its AI services. On X, Jeff posted, "Index freshness is something I and many others at Google have worked on for many years."
Here is that post:
Index freshness is something I and many others at Google have worked on for many years. https://t.co/XEimydWqm7
— Jeff Dean (@JeffDean) June 20, 2025
He cited Delip Rao who wrote:
If you are using search tools offered by closed LLM providers (e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI), be aware that these companies use their own search indexes, which are not updated in real-time or even regularly. As a result, you may occasionally encounter 404 links, which can tarnish the reputation of your downstream app.The only exception to this is Gemini, which returns results from Google's index which is updated in real-time.
Here is Ben Kaufman from Google also mentioning this:
Freshness retrieval and ranking is also very challenging. Have been doing some work in this area and still a lot more to be done!
— Ben Kaufman (@ben_kauf) June 20, 2025
Google has always been obsessed with index freshness, since the super early days of Google Search. I believe the Caffeine update from 2009 made Google incredibly fast at not just indexing but serving based on a fresh index.
That being said, Google is super good at getting fresh content - like it or not - and it uses that within Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and other Google services.
Early on, Microsoft made a big deal (rightfully so) of its prometheus algorithms to incorporate OpenAI's ChatGPT into its own Bing Chat (now Copilot). Because Bing has a fresh search index and OpenAI's index was stale.
That being said, the competitors are moving fast and while Google is much better at having a fresh index, OpenAI has a ton of money to do impressive things here.
Forum discussion at X.
