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Content dates

Silktide checks that your longer, article-style pages declare when they were published or last updated in a way machines can read. AI assistants and search engines use these dates to judge whether content is current enough to cite.

A date printed in the page text is not enough on its own - it needs to be declared in a machine-readable form. Silktide recognises, in order of strength:

  • - datePublished / dateModified in , for example on an Article or BlogPosting. The strongest signal, and the one answer engines extract most reliably.
  • Date meta tags - for example article:published_time and article:modified_time.
  • A <time datetime="..."> element - accepted when the page contains exactly one unambiguous value.

Why this matters

When an AI assistant or search engine decides which pages to quote, "how current is this?" is part of the judgement. A page that declares no date gives no answer, so it loses out to dated content even when it is better. This quietly costs you citations and traffic without any visible error.

Dates also help human visitors: knowing an article was written last month rather than five years ago changes how much they trust it.

How to fix it

  1. Add publication and modification dates to your page's structured data. Most platforms and blog themes can do this automatically:
<script type="application\/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https:\/\/schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "Example article",
  "datePublished": "2026-05-01",
  "dateModified": "2026-07-10"
}
</script>
  1. Alternatively, add date meta tags or a <time> element with a datetime attribute:
<!-- Meta tag approach -->
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2026-05-01T09:00:00Z">

<!-- Visible date that is also machine-readable -->
<time datetime="2026-05-01">1 May 2026</time>
  1. Keep dateModified honest - update it when the content genuinely changes, not on every republish.

How Silktide tests this

  1. Test only indexable pages - pages excluded from search engines are not citation candidates.
  2. Measure the page's meaningful body text, excluding navigation, headers, and footers. Pages with less than about 2,000 characters (roughly 300 words) of body text are skipped: navigational pages, product stubs, and thin pages are not expected to carry dates.
  3. Look for a declared created or updated date from structured data, date meta tags, or a single unambiguous <time datetime> element.
  4. Warn when a substantive page declares none of these.

The HTTP Last-Modified header does not count: it describes the server response rather than the content, and on dynamically generated sites it changes with every request. The judgement uses extracted dates and text lengths only, so it behaves the same in every language.

Troubleshooting

My page shows a date but is still flagged

A date that only appears as visible text is ambiguous to machines - "05/06/26" could be May or June, published or updated. Declare the date in structured data, a meta tag, or a <time datetime> attribute as shown above.

This page does not need a date

Silktide already skips short and navigational pages, but some long pages are genuinely timeless - legal terms, for example. If a date makes no sense for the page, the finding.

Learn more

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Content dates | Silktide Help