• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

In an effort to understand how much outdated and stale information brands leave on websites for OpenAI ChatGPT to discover, retrieve, and cite with each consumer query, BrightEdge researchers reviewed pages at six major U.S. retailers cited as sources by ChatGPT from June through August 2026.

Some came from retail newsrooms, while others came from store hubs and websites.  

OpenAI describes its shopping experience as pulling in product queries through structured merchant data, an agentic commerce protocol and public product information.

When webpages continue to host outdated, stale ads and web content from past years, it can present challenges for brands and consumers attempting to find the latest styles during this year's holiday season.

For this data, the age of the content on the website page does not determine what ChatGPT cites.

About 1 in 10 cited holiday pages are from a year that has already passed.

At two retailers, newsroom posts captured 71.7% and 63.1% of Black Friday citations, compared with 10.5% and 13.3% for store websites.

BrightEdge attributes this to the chatbot finding the information in press releases.

Once releases are posted to a website, the retailer or brand does not typically move them to another URL or location in the website. A seasonal holiday website page may be renamed or replaced each year in a different location on the brand's site.

The data shows that permanent and current content performs better with AI engines.

Best Buy’s permanent Black Friday web pages, for example, were captured about 37.6% of the time in ChatGPT's citations, compared to 63.0% when it included a URL variant, an alternative version of a web address that pointed to the same piece of content. 

Best Buy's dated webpage share came in at 4.2%. Home Depot’s current buying guides on its website included product specifications, collection links and FAQs. Its newsroom was cited mainly for current posts, helping to keep its share of dated pages to 1.8%.

On average across six major retailers, 11% of ChatGPT's cited sources were old, outdated or neglected pages.

Best Buy and Home Depot scored the highest in keeping clean, current, and optimized content on pages. ChatGPT only cited neglected or outdated content on pages 4.2% and 1.8% of the time for them.

For example, ChatGPT answered a question about the 2026 holiday season with last year's information about nine out of 10 times. This often occurs when someone searches for news information about an event and the bot returns outdated information. 

Posts in retail newsrooms earned more Black Friday citations in the chatbot response than store hubs at two of the six retailers analyzed.

None of the six retailers were among the 15 most-cited sources for gift-idea prompts, although sites such as Reddit, Good Housekeeping and Forbes lead that list.

When a gift prompt cited a retailer’s page, the chatbot suggested the brand’s or company’s help page that included receipts, registries or returns.

Each retailer had at least 25 distinct cited Black Friday web pages, and actual totals are higher because the analysis covers only the 25 most-cited URLs per retailer.