Recency is read as reliability

The single most consequential thing on your profile is the timestamp, not the prose. A buyer deciding between two listings will discard the one that looks dormant without reading it, because a dormant listing carries the one risk they cannot price: sending money to someone who never replies.

This is good news, because keeping a profile live is cheap and rewriting it is not.

What "live" actually looks like to a buyer

Four things carry the signal, in roughly this order.

Last-seen or last-active status, where the platform shows one. The date of the most recent review. Whether the stated turnaround is plausible for someone currently working. Whether anything on the page is visibly out of date - a seasonal note, a price that contradicts another price, an offer for a format you have since dropped.

Notice that three of the four are behavioural and only one is copy. The buyer is not evaluating your writing; they are estimating the probability that a message gets answered.

The habits that keep it live

Log in most days, even briefly. On platforms that surface an activity indicator this is the entire task, and it takes under a minute.

Reply to everything, including the enquiries you are going to decline. Response rate is usually a tracked metric, it usually feeds ranking, and declining fast is free - the wording is in the piece on turning work down.

Keep the work flowing at whatever rate you can sustain. A recent review does more for the recency signal than any status indicator, and it is the only one a buyer trusts completely.

Touch one small thing a month. Update a turnaround, refresh a line, adjust availability. Some platforms treat any edit as a freshness event.

Why this beats rewriting

A rewrite changes something the ranking system weights lightly and the buyer reads briefly. Availability and response speed change the things it weights heavily and the buyer checks first.

There is also a measurement problem with rewrites. Change five things at once and you learn nothing, because the enquiry volume in any given fortnight is too small to attribute. Change one thing, wait, and you have data - the post on reading a quiet month covers the difference between no enquiries and no conversions, which are opposite problems with opposite fixes.

The decay is faster than people expect

Visibility built over months erodes over weeks. Ranking systems that weight recency do so aggressively, because a stale listing that takes a booking and does not deliver is the worst outcome the platform can produce. In the EU, the Platform-to-Business Regulation, applicable since July 2020, pushes platforms to identify the key parameters behind ranking and communicate them to businesses, so read yours before guessing.

If you do go quiet, the recovery is not a rewrite either - it is completed work, and what happens when you stop for a month has the shape of the curve.

The one thing worth actually redoing

The image, when it is more than a year old or was never really yours. It is the element that most reliably reads as abandoned, it is checked before any text, and replacing it is an afternoon rather than a rewrite - the listing image piece has the constraints.

Buyers themselves say the dormant-profile check is close to the first thing they do, which is described from their side in the etiquette guide and is worth reading once for the ordering alone. What is being compared against you, when a buyer decides you look inactive, is usually an automated tool that is always available - instantly responsive is the baseline you are measured against, not the other people. If you display any historical figures on your profile, keep in mind that what the data side considers a defensible number is a stricter standard than a marketplace bio usually applies.

Which activity signals a Rate Cock listing actually exposes to buyers, and how they are computed, is on the judges page.