What is a Knowledge Cutoff?
A knowledge cutoff is the point in time where a model's training data ends. A model with a January 2026 cutoff knows nothing that happened after that date on its own. Live AI search works around this with retrieval, fetching current web content at answer time.
Why it matters for brands
If your brand, product, or rebrand launched after a model's cutoff, the model's built-in knowledge does not include it. Your visibility then depends entirely on the retrieval layer finding and trusting current pages about you. This is why new companies can be well covered in Perplexity yet unknown to an offline model.
Working with cutoffs
- Get facts about your brand onto pages retrieval bots can crawl today
- Earn coverage on sources that models cite; it enters training data over time
- Expect answers to differ between assistants with and without live search
- Monitor across models; cutoff differences are a common cause of divergent answers