Freshness signals: the dates a page publishes about itself

What a freshness signal is

A freshness signal is anything on a page that says when its content was published or last changed. There are four common carriers: the Last-Modified response header, datePublished and dateModified in structured data, a <time datetime> element in the markup, and the Open Graph article:published_time and article:modified_time meta tags.

None of them is required, and a page with none is not broken. They matter on content whose age changes its usefulness, where a visible date helps a reader decide whether to trust what they are reading.

What squirrel checks

The rule runs on every crawled page and emits one check per signal it finds, plus a fallback:

• http-last-modified passes when the response carries a Last-Modified header. Message: Last-Modified header present, with the header value.
• schema-dates passes when any JSON-LD block contains the text datePublished or dateModified. Message: Date schema markup present.
• time-elements passes when the page has any time[datetime]. Message: 3 <time> element(s) found, with the first datetime value.
• og-article-dates passes when either article:published_time or article:modified_time is present. Message: Open Graph article dates present.
• freshness reports info when none of those were found. Message: No freshness signals detected, with Consider adding date schema or Last-Modified header as the value.

The schema test is a substring match over the script text rather than a parse, so it does not check that the date belongs to the node describing the page. content/date-agreement is the rule that does. Severity info, weight 3.

How to fix it

<time datetime="2026-03-12">12 March 2026</time>

Publish the date in the markup and in the structured data, both from the same content timestamp. A <time datetime> element is the piece that is visible to the reader as well as machine-readable.

Update dateModified when you make a substantive change, and leave it alone when you do not. A date that moves on every deploy is not a freshness signal.

Enable / disable

Disable this rule

[rules]
disable = ["content/freshness"]

Disable all Content rules

[rules]
disable = ["content/*"]

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["content/freshness"]

enable replaces the default ["*"], so this is the only rule selected. Leave disable out: a rule that matches any disable pattern is skipped even when enable names it. Only an enabled setting under a rule’s own [rule_options] table overrides both lists.

Related rules

• content/date-agreement: whether those signals agree with each other.
• crawl/sitemap-lastmod-drift: the sitemap date compared against them.
• eeat/content-dates: dates read as a trust signal.
• content/stale-copyright: the footer year, a different claim entirely.

Content findings ship in every audit next to the SEO, performance and agent experience rules. See Fix SEO issues with AI for how an agent works through a report.

References

• Article structured data, Google Search Central
• Last-Modified, MDN

Check your site

Run squirrel audit https://example.com and open the Content section of the report. Each page is listed with the date signals it carries. Signed-out local audits need no account and cost nothing. Signed-in audits spend credits.