"Just change the date and republish to refresh."

"Just change the date and republish to refresh."

That's not a refresh. That's a lie with a timestamp.

Google reads the content diff, not the date you typed. Here's the protocol that actually re-ranks a decaying page:

— Pull the page's queries in Search Console, sorted by where it slipped. Those declining queries tell you what's gone stale.
— Compare against the current top 3 results. What do they cover that you don't? Add that, not more of what you already had.
— Rewrite the intro and title to match how people phrase the query now — search language drifts.
— Update genuinely dated facts, numbers, screenshots. Then, and only then, update the modified date.
— Re-submit the URL for crawling. A real update with no recrawl is a tree falling in an empty forest.

The diff is the refresh. (Changing dateModified with identical body content gets you nothing — Google's been hashing content for years. It knows you didn't touch the words.)