How often each kind of content updates

Tick risk is seasonal. Public-health guidance changes mid-season. Recalls happen. We commit to specific review intervals per content type — and we publish those intervals publicly so you can call us out if a page goes stale.

Tick Watch homepage strip — daily

Pulled fresh every morning at 06:30 UTC from CDC, FDA, EPA, state health departments, major news outlets, YouTube, and Reddit via filtered Tavily searches. Results are quality-filtered (no junk URLs, no clickbait titles, topic-relevance check on social) and deduped by URL. Sources beyond the homepage strip stay in JSON for the next refresh, so a category never renders blank.

Pipeline: scripts/fetch-tick-watch.mjs → GitHub Action → JSON commit → Vercel auto-redeploy.

State guides — annual + season-trigger

Each state's §13a State Data Row carries a lastReviewed date. We refresh:

• Annually — before peak tick season (April for most states).
• Whenever the state authority publishes new surveillance — e.g. MDHHS, MDH, WI DHS, MDC, DHSS updates.
• Whenever a tick-borne-disease alert hits the state — e.g. confirmed new vector species, outbreak cluster, label change for a state-relevant pesticide.

Cluster articles — ongoing

Identification, removal, prevention, pet, and yard articles carry a lastUpdated date in frontmatter. Refresh triggers:

• New CDC, FDA, EPA, or AVMA guidance affecting the article.
• Reviewer-flagged change requests.
• Material correction submissions from readers.
• Annual reviewer re-signoff (Tier 2 medical + Tier 3 DVM).

Visual ID species pages — annual + entomology signoff

Range, habitat, and life-cycle claims are reviewed annually by the entomology reviewer. Look-alike cross-references update when new species pages ship. Macro-photo assets stay unless a higher-quality commissioned image lands.

Affiliate product registry — quarterly + label-change-trigger

Every Amazon ASIN in src/data/affiliate-asins.json is verified quarterly to ensure the product is still listed, the description still matches, and no recall has hit. Any FDA recall or label change involving a registered SKU triggers an immediate review of every article that links to it.

Maps — annual + state-data-trigger

County-level shading SVGs are regenerated when the source CSVs update. National choropleth refreshes when CDC publishes new Lyme incidence data (typically annually).

When something goes stale anyway

Tell us at contact. We treat staleness reports the same as factual corrections — 48-hour SLA on weekdays.