The boom in Internet of Things (IoT) has spawned many real-time applications, which have stringent requirements for the timeliness of information delivery. As a result, age of information (AoI) has emerged as a metric to evaluate information freshness at the destination node and aroused widespread attention from both academia and industry. In this paper, we develop a locally adaptive power control policy for wireless ad hoc networks, which adjusts each node’s transmit power according to its local observation so as to optimize the sum of average AoI of all destination nodes. The proposed scheme has a low implementation complexity. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme is well adapted to variants of network environment and can significantly improve information freshness.