Assistants and search engines weight recency, and an undated page reads as undated rather than as new. This checks whether your publish date, last modified date and a visible date are actually in the page.
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Runs the full audit on your live site. Your report opens in your dashboard.
This looks for three separate things and scores them separately: a machine readable publish date in the markup, a last modified date, and a date a human reader can actually see on the page. They come from different places, article schema, meta tags and visible text, and a page very often has one without the others. It runs alongside the structured data check, since the cleanest way to publish a date is in Article schema.
Recency is one of the few quality signals a system can compute with certainty rather than infer, so both search engines and assistants lean on it. An undated page is not treated as new; it is treated as unknown, which in a comparison against a dated competitor is a quiet loss. The visible date matters separately from the markup date because it is what a reader uses to decide whether to trust the page at all.
No publish date is a warning and no date of any kind is a failure. The fix is a template change rather than an editorial one, so it fixes every page at once. One caution worth stating: updating the modified date without changing anything is a trick that works briefly and reads as manipulation over time. Change the content, then change the date.
Dates are cheap to fix and they sit inside a group of trust signals that fail together: no date, no author, no Organization schema, usually all from the same template. The audit reports the group rather than the item, which is how you find out it is one afternoon of work rather than three.
A date that is always today and exists nowhere in the response, from a template somebody wrote to look current.
The visible date is the reader's own clock. Nothing in the served HTML carries a date at all, so every machine reading this page sees an undated document, and every human sees a page that was somehow updated the moment they arrived. The check scores three things separately — a machine-readable publish date, a modified date, and a date a reader can see — because a page very often has one without the others. This one has none of the three, while appearing to have the third. In our audit of 88 professional marketing sites, 28 carried no date a machine could find.
<p class="post-meta">
Updated <span id="updated"></span>
</p>
<script>
document.getElementById('updated').textContent =
new Date().toLocaleDateString();
</script>datePublished and dateModified, as ISO strings, in the JSON-LD. That is the version every machine reads first.<time datetime="…"> element with the real date in the markup. If it needs JavaScript to appear, it does not exist.Yes, with a last updated date rather than a publish date. Hiding the date does not make a page look current, it makes it unverifiable, and a reader who cannot tell how old advice is tends to assume the worst.
In Article schema as datePublished and dateModified, and in visible text near the byline. Meta tags alone are read by machines but not by the reader deciding whether to trust you.
Only when the content genuinely changed. Systems compare the new version against what they already have, so a date bump with identical text buys a short lived bounce and a durable credibility problem.
Written up properly, for the question a result usually raises next.
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