How it works

Why the Refresher leaves "IPL Auction 2018" alone

12 October 2026 · 2 min read

A year in a title can mean two opposite things. How OnlyAI SEO tells a guide that should stay current from a post about something that happened, and why it matters for refresh suggestions.

"Best processors to buy in 2018" and "2018 FIFA World Cup" both have a year in the title that has passed. The first is out of date. The second is history. A tool that treats them the same will tell you to "use the current year in the title" of a World Cup report, which is wrong, and a little embarrassing.

That is exactly the mistake our own Refresher agent made on a sports and tech site: it proposed refreshing posts such as "IPL Auction 2018", "Michael Carrick retires at the end of the 2017-18 season" and "2017 Top Scorer". So it now asks a question first: is this post evergreen, dated, or unclear?

How it decides

It reads only the title and the category and tag names. No AI, no cost, the same answer every time.

• Dated signs: a season written as a range (2017-18), a year at the start followed by an event or a record, a competition or ceremony (World Cup, auction, Oscars, final), something that happens to a person once (retires, signs, wins, sacked), results and records of one year (top scorer, winners, highlights).
• Evergreen signs: best, top 10, ultimate, how to, guide, checklist, tips, comparison, trends, "to buy", reviews, and the things guides are written about (laptops, processors, apps, plugins).
• When both appear, the post is left alone unless the evergreen signs clearly win. A sports post with no guide wording leans dated.

What changes for each kind

• Dated post. No proposal at all: not for the year, not for age, not for a click drop. A match report does not need refreshing, and its traffic falls for a good reason. The run just notes how many such posts it left alone.
• Evergreen post. Raised as before, with a suggested SEO title carrying the current year.
• Unclear. Raised gently, at low impact, with a card that says: decide first; if this records that year, dismiss it.

Overruling it

Any post can be marked by hand with the custom field _onlyai_evergreen: set it to yes and the post is always treated as a guide, no and it is always treated as dated. A filter, onlyai_seo_evergreen_kind, lets a site decide for whole groups of posts. The Evergreen Renewer uses the same test, so it will not rewrite a result page either.