Query Deserves Freshness (QDF)
Query deserves freshness, or QDF, is Google's name for the systems that favor newer pages when someone's search needs current information. Google's own example is a movie that just came out: people searching for it likely want recent reviews, not old articles from when filming started.
Source: Google Search Central, A guide to Google Search ranking systems (freshness systems), checked October 29, 2026
What Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) means for your business
SEO writers also call it freshness weighting. Google's guide for its search raters, who check results but don't set rankings, lists the kinds of searches that need fresh results: breaking news, recurring events like elections or sports seasons, current facts like prices or airfares, and products, where people want the latest model. For those searches, raters are told to mark down pages with old prices or past events.
Little of what a local business publishes is news. Where QDF touches you is recurring events and current facts: this season's schedule, this year's prices, holiday hours. We'd list the searches where a buyer expects this year's answer and update those pages before the season starts.
The same guide says freshness matters less when raters judge a page's overall quality. An older page can still rate well if someone keeps it up, so we wouldn't rewrite a solid guide just to give it a new date.
If buyers search for something seasonal, like a summer schedule or an event date, and your site shows the old one, answering those time-bound questions on your own pages comes early in our answer engine work.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview cited Google's ranking guide alongside SEO news sites, tool blogs and YouTube, and described how QDF spots hot topics, detail Google's guide doesn't give. ChatGPT called it Google's concept and cited nothing.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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