Content Freshness Checker

The Content Freshness Checker finds the dates a crawler can read on a page: article published and modified times, dates in structured data, the Last-Modified header, and any year near the top of the text. It then works out roughly how many days old the page is, with a pass up to 365 days, a warning up to 730 and a fail beyond that.

Updated 23 October 2026

How to read the result

The headline says about how many days ago the page was last updated, or that it has no date a machine can read. Below it are six checks, one for each place a date can live and one for the overall age.

The age comes from the first date the tool finds, in this order: the modified time, the published time, the date in structured data, then the Last-Modified header.

Where the dates come from

Source	What the tool reads
article:modified_time	A meta tag in the page head
article:published_time	A meta tag in the page head
Structured data	dateModified or datePublished in the page's JSON-LD
Last-Modified header	A header your server sends with the page
Visible year	A year from 2010 to 2029 in the first 4,000 characters of text

Fixing a missing or old date

Many sites send no Last-Modified header, which is common for pages built on the fly, so a warning on that line is not unusual. The meta tags and structured data are easier to add.

Add article:published_time and article:modified_time to the page head.
Add datePublished and dateModified to the page's structured data.
Show the published or updated date on the page itself.
Change the modified date only when the content changed.
Review pages that fail the age check and update the facts that have gone out of date.

How much dates matter for AI answers

In Peak Answer's look at pages ChatGPT cites, only about 5% showed a visible date. A date helps readers judge a page, and a good result here does not mean more citations.

Common questions

How old is too old?

The freshness checker passes a page that was updated within 365 days and warns up to 730. How often a page needs updating depends on the topic. A pricing page needs it more often than an explainer on a stable subject.

Does changing the date improve rankings or citations?

Changing a date without changing the content does nothing useful for readers. Update the date when the page has changed.

Why does the tool say my page has no date?

The freshness checker says a page has no date when it finds no modified or published meta tag, no date in structured data and no Last-Modified header. A date written in the page text may still be visible to readers, and the tool also reports any year it finds near the top.