Is your content still worth citing?

Recency is one signal ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini weigh when they choose what to cite: a page that reads as current is easier to trust than one with no visible update in years. It is one signal among many, not the whole ranking, and a well-written old page can still beat a thin new one.

In order: schema.org datePublished or dateModified in the page's structured data, then article:published_time or article:modified_time meta tags, then the lastmod value in your sitemap. Schema and meta tags come from the page itself and are the most trustworthy; sitemap lastmod is the fallback when neither is present.

Not fully. Some CMSs and static site generators bump every page's lastmod on every deploy, whether or not the content actually changed. That makes an entire site look freshly updated when nothing was. This tool prefers page-level dates for exactly that reason, and only falls back to lastmod when nothing else is available.

There is no universal number. A reasonable habit is reviewing anything older than six to twelve months: check the facts, numbers and product details still hold, then update the modified date honestly, only when you actually changed something.

An AI answer engine cannot verify how current a page is if it finds no date anywhere: no schema, no meta tag, no sitemap lastmod. That page might be perfectly current, but the engine has no way to know, so it is safer to date your content than to leave it unmarked.

We read your sitemap (up to 50 entries kept) and fetch up to 30 of those pages once, to pull their title, description and dates. Nothing is saved after the check runs, and the fetch happens once per click, not on a schedule.