How do AI tools know when my page was published?
From a date the page states in a machine-readable form. "Last updated in the spring" or a date set in the design is text that has to be interpreted, in whatever language and order the site chose. A date in the page's markup is a single, unambiguous value that a machine can compare with today.
What it actually is
There are a few standard places to put a date so software can read it: the article dates in the page's social-sharing tags, a published or modified date in its structured data, or a visible date wrapped in a time element that carries the exact value alongside the friendly wording. Any one of them is enough. Each says the same thing a reader sees, in a form that cannot be misread.
Why it matters
Answer engines weigh how current a source is, especially for anything that changes: prices, guidance, rules, how a product works. A page with a readable date can be judged on its age; a page without one is either treated as undated or dated by guesswork, and neither helps a page that is genuinely recent. Dates also let a machine tell your updated page from the stale copy of it somewhere else.
What good looks like
Every page where time matters states when it was first published and when it was last meaningfully changed, in markup, and the visible date says the same. The dates are true: an update date moves when the content changes, not every time the site is rebuilt.
Being honest about it
This is a warning at most, and it matters far more on articles, guides and news than on a contact page. We are strict about the form: a date written only as text, however clear to a person, does not count, because a machine reading "3/4/25" or a date in another language has to guess. That is precisely the gap this check exists to point out.
Where most sites go wrong
The most common case is a date that is printed in the design and marked up nowhere. The second is the opposite failure: a site that stamps every page with the date of its last deploy, so every page claims to have changed today and the signal stops meaning anything.
On the web
State of the Web · November 2026In November 2026, 10% of the sites we could read passed the “A machine-readable published / updated date” check.
WordPress sites pass it most often, at 73%. Shopify sites pass it least often, at 0%.
On the sites scanned in both October 2026 and November 2026, it stayed at 18%.
The month-by-month line counts the sites scanned in each calendar month, so it can differ from the figure above, which uses each site’s latest scan from the last three months.
Goes with
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Sites that pass this are 9.5 times as likely to pass the “Resource-discovery Link headers” check too. 7% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 1% of the sites that do not.
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Sites that pass this are 5.5 times as likely to pass the “security.txt is published” check too. 17% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 3% of the sites that do not.
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Sites that pass this are 4.5 times as likely to pass the “Content usage preferences declared” check too. 12% of the sites that pass the first check pass this one, against 3% of the sites that do not.
Not enough history yet.
Based on the sites Bot Appétit has scanned. Most of these sites come from lists we scan for research. Not a random sample of the web.
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