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Freshness & Staleness

Ground tracks how recent your indexed content is, helping you trust search results.

Key Concepts

Freshness

Freshness is measured as the number of days since a source was last successfully synced.

Staleness Budget

The staleness budget is a configurable threshold (default: 30 days) that determines when content is considered stale.

Staleness Warning

When a source exceeds its staleness budget:
  • Results from that source are marked is_stale: true
  • A warning is included in the response
  • Results may be filtered depending on policy settings

How It Works

Configuring Staleness

Via Trust Policy

Common staleness budgets:
  • 7 days (604800 seconds) - for rapidly changing content
  • 30 days (2592000 seconds) - default, good for most cases
  • 90 days (7776000 seconds) - for stable documentation

Enforcement

Toggle staleness enforcement:
When enforce_staleness is true and include_stale is false in the search request, stale results are filtered out entirely.

Search Response Signals

Per-Result Freshness

Staleness Summary

Warnings

Best Practices

Use cron jobs or CI/CD to trigger syncs regularly and keep content fresh.
  • API specs: shorter budget (7-14 days)
  • Code repos: medium budget (14-30 days)
  • Stable docs: longer budget (30-90 days)
If you frequently see staleness warnings, increase sync frequency for those sources.