AI Visibility pillar / check content-freshness
Article freshness date
On article pages only, we read every published or updated date signal and report the newest one and its age at the time of the audit. Homepages and service pages do not need a date and are not measured.
By Shimon Carroll, Founder, SEO for AI Agents · Last updated
What this check measures
On article pages: datePublished and dateModified in the JSON-LD, the article:published_time, article:modified_time and og:updated_time meta tags, and a visible labeled date such as "Last updated: Feb 14, 2026". We report the newest date, where it came from, and its age in days at the moment the audit started. Whether those signals agree with each other is the date-signal-consistency check.
Why it matters
Google's byline date guidance asks for a user-visible date, featured prominently and labeled with text like "Published" or "Last updated", plus datePublished and dateModified in the article markup. Its helpful content guidance warns against changing dates to make pages seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed.
How we score it
An article with no date at all is LOW. An article whose newest date is more than two years before the audit is LOW. Otherwise it passes. Non-article pages are not measured.
Confidence-flag rules
MEDIUM. Dates are read verbatim; a date we cannot parse is ignored rather than guessed.
Common mistakes
- Updating dateModified on every deploy without changing the article.
- Showing no date on time-sensitive advice.
- Adding datePublished to a homepage, which does not need one.
How to fix it
Show a labeled published or updated date on each article and add datePublished and dateModified to its Article markup. Change the modified date only when you really revise the content.
Primary sources
- Google Search Central, influence your byline dates in Google Search (last updated 2025-12-10; accessed 2026-10-07)
Google Search Central
- Google Search Central, creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (accessed 2026-10-07)
Google Search Central
- Google Search Central, Article structured data and author markup best practices (last updated 2026-09-08; accessed 2026-10-07)
Google Search Central
Changelog
- · Applies only to article-like pages (the check used to ask homepages for datePublished). Reads article meta tags and a visible "Updated" or "Published" date as well as schema dates, and measures age against the audit start time.