Should I update dates to look fresh?

No. Change the date when you make a real update. Search engines compare dates with content changes, and a bumped date on unchanged text can cost you trust.

Why does my homepage show no dates?

Homepages rarely have them. Run the check on an article, guide or docs page.

Which date do you trust most?

JSON-LD dateModified, then a visible “Updated” date, then datePublished, then other visible dates, elements, sitemap lastmod and the Last-Modified header.

Yes. Every tool is free with no signup.

Do you store what I enter?

Browser tools never leave your device. Live tools fetch the URL you enter and don’t save the result.

How is this different from the site audit?

This tool checks one thing in depth. The site audit checks everything at once and scores SEO, AI Search and Agent Readiness.

Tools / On-page

Do your page dates agree with each other?

Find every date a page exposes: visible text, JSON-LD, meta tags, <time> elements, sitemap lastmod and HTTP headers. Then check that they agree.

Free, no signup.

Page URL (an article or guide works best)

Example result: smoothrecorder.com/alternatives/screen-studio · checked 2026-09-30

Freshness

Verdict	✓ Fresh: last update 2026-09-25, 6 days ago (from <time datetime> #1)
Dates found	4
Consistency issues	2

Every date on the page

<time datetime> #1	2026-09-25 · 6 days ago
<time datetime> #2	2026-09-25 · 6 days ago
<time datetime> #3	2026-09-25 · 6 days ago
Sitemap lastmod	2026-09-29 · 1 day ago

What to fix

No datePublished or dateModified in JSON-LD. Add them to your Article or BlogPosting markup.
The 30 URLs in that sitemap share just 2 lastmod values (63% identical). That is usually the build or deploy time, not the date the content changed, and Google stops trusting lastmod that isn’t accurate.

Found in https://smoothrecorder.com/sitemap.xml (30 URLs).

Why it matters

Fresh pages get cited more

In SE Ranking’s 129,000-domain study, pages updated in the last three months averaged 6.0 ChatGPT citations vs 3.6 for older pages.

Google wants consistency

Google asks for the visible date and datePublished/dateModified to match, and says never to use future dates.

Fake lastmod backfires

Google uses sitemap lastmod only when it is “consistently and verifiably accurate”. A sitemap where every URL changed at build time teaches it to ignore you.

What it checks

Structured data

datePublished and dateModified in JSON-LD, across Article, BlogPosting and WebPage.

Visible date

“Updated …” or “Published …” text and <time datetime> elements in the raw HTML.

Meta tags

article:published_time, article:modified_time, og:updated_time and similar.

Sitemap lastmod

We find the page in your sitemaps and flag sitemaps where nearly every URL shares one lastmod.

Last-Modified header

Ignored when it is just the time of our request.

Consistency

Future dates, modified-before-published, and visible vs structured vs sitemap mismatches.

How it works

Enter a URL

A domain or page address. No install, nothing to add to your site.

We fetch it live

Our servers request the page read-only, the way a crawler would.

Read and fix

Get the results in seconds, with what each one means.

Questions

More in On-page

Meta Tag AnalyzerTitle, description, canonical, robots, Open Graph and Twitter tags in one view.Heading AnalyzerCheck the H1 to H6 outline and spot skipped or duplicate headings.Outbound Link CheckerEvery external site a page links to, parsed from the HTML.

Check everything at once

The site audit checks your whole site and scores SEO, AI Search and Agent Readiness in about 30 seconds.

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