The year helps when the content is genuinely time-sensitive and you commit to updating it, and it dates the page badly when the content is evergreen or you won’t maintain the year. The pivot is time-sensitive-and-maintained versus evergreen-or-neglected. Adding the current year to every title for a freshness boost is the reflex to avoid, because the year is only an asset when it is both relevant and kept true.
When content is genuinely tied to a moment, the year is a real promise. A page about tax rules, software features, pricing, best tools, or anything that changes year to year gains from a title that signals which year’s information it carries, because freshness is part of the value the searcher is after. Some searchers even add the year to their query for exactly that reason. But this only pays off if you actually update the page and its title when the calendar turns. A “2026” guide refreshed each year stays current and keeps earning the click; a “2026” guide left untouched into 2028 advertises its own staleness and tells searchers, at a glance, that it is out of date.
When content is evergreen, the year works against you. A page explaining a stable concept, how a process works, what a term means, a principle that does not change, gains nothing from a date and risks looking dated the moment the year rolls over, even though the content is still perfectly accurate. You have attached an expiry signal to something that never expires, and you have created maintenance work that buys nothing. For this content, leaving the year out keeps the page timeless and saves you from a stamp that only ever ages.
So decide by the content’s nature and your willingness to maintain it. Add the year only to genuinely time-sensitive pages you will keep updated, and build the refresh into your routine so the title never falls behind the calendar. Leave it off evergreen pages entirely. Matched to the right content and kept honest, the year is a freshness signal; pasted on by reflex or left to rot, it is just a date that ages the page.