How often should health content be reviewed and dated?

A practice should set its review cycle by how fast each kind of fact changes, not by one calendar for the whole site. Provider availability and hours need checking monthly; networks, telehealth, and prices quarterly; clinical explanations and bios at least yearly; and any page immediately when a rule, service, or provider it describes changes. The date shown on a page should move only when someone actually reviewed or changed it.

Our page on clinical review for health content covers who should review a page and the events that should trigger an early review. This page covers the calendar: how often each page type comes up, how to track facts that expire on a known date, and what the visible date on a page should mean.

This is a content-operations question for practice owners and marketing leads. It is not clinical or legal guidance, and the cycles below are a planning starting point, not a standard any regulator sets.

Sort pages by how fast their facts change

One annual review of the whole site sounds tidy and fails in practice. The new-patient status of a provider can change in a week; a description of a long-standing procedure may hold for a year or more. Group pages by the speed of their most volatile fact, and give each group its own cycle and owner.

Adjust the cycles to your practice. A group that changes plan participation often may need monthly cost reviews; a small office with stable staff may check bios once a year. What matters is that every page has a cycle, an owner, and a date it was last checked. A page with no owner is the one most likely to drift, because nobody's calendar ever brings it back into view.

Track the facts that come with an end date

Some sentences on a practice site depend on rules with known expiration or extension dates. Telehealth is the clearest case. HHS's telehealth policy page, last updated in February 2026, says "Recent legislation authorized an extension of many of the Medicare telehealth flexibilities through December 31, 2027." Any page that describes Medicare telehealth options at your practice is tied to that date, and it should be reviewed well before it, whatever its normal cycle says. Our page on explaining telehealth options covers what those pages should say.

Keep a short register of these dependencies: the sentence, the rule it relies on, the date that matters, and who will check it. A question worth asking at each quarterly content meeting: "Which sentences on our site depend on a rule with an end date, and whose calendar is that date on?" If nobody can answer, the register is missing a row.

Decide what the visible date means

Google's documentation on byline dates advises site owners to "Add a user-visible date to the page and feature it prominently," to "Label your dates appropriately with text like 'Publish' or 'Last updated'," and to "Make your dates and times consistent" between the page and any structured data, where it describes the datePublished and dateModified fields. That covers the mechanics. The practice still has to decide what event moves the date.

Health pages benefit from keeping two dates distinct. A reviewed date is not an updated date. One records that a qualified person read the page and confirmed it still holds; the other records that the content changed. A treatment page reviewed by a physician with no edits has a new review date and the same update date, and the internal log should say so. Whether you show one date or both, the label on the page should match the event behind it.

Never move a date without a review

It is tempting to refresh dates across the site to make it look current. Google's helpful content guidance lists, among its self-assessment questions, "Are you changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed?" For health content the problem is larger than search: a recent date tells a patient someone checked the page recently, and if nobody did, the date is a false statement about the practice's care for its own information.

Tie every date change to a log entry: the page, the reviewer, the date, and what changed or why nothing did. If the log is empty, the date stays where it is. When a page needs more than an edit, our article on deciding whether to update a page or create new content helps with the next step.

A fictional quarterly review calendar

Here is a hypothetical calendar for a fictional allergy and asthma practice in Kentucky with two offices. It shows the rhythm, not any real practice's schedule.

The calendar is short on purpose, so it survives a busy season. The marketing lead should not have to invent whether the Saturday clinic still runs or which plans the practice dropped in July; the calendar puts those questions in front of the people who know, on a schedule, and the log records the answers.

In Hudson South's process, the Authority Asset gathers the practice's approved knowledge and evidence. Hudson Twenty-One records how the practice communicates across 21 dimensions, Market Intelligence researches the questions patients ask and the market around the practice, and AEO Creation turns those inputs into answer-first content. Review and dating stay with the practice. See our overview of content for medical, dental and wellness practices for the rest of the set.

Find the stale pages before patients do

On a free 30-minute call, Hudson South walks you through how current your pages look next to the practices patients compare you with.

Sources

1. Telehealth policy updates. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Read 2026-10-16.
2. Add a Byline Date to Google Search Results. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-16.
3. Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-16.