Does your page look current to Google?
Paste in a URL and we grade the page across date signals, update substance, stat recency and dated references, then show you what to fix. Built on Google's own patents, the 2024 API leak and Google's date guidance. Nothing is stored.
This is a fast, automated read of freshness signals. It does not verify your stats against their original sources, rewrite the page or update it for you. See what it does and doesn't do below.
The grader finds the stale. We refresh it.
Free tells you what's aging. Our service does the rest. We swap stale stats for current sourced figures, refresh dated examples, add honest update signals and clean date schema, then hand the page back ready to ship.
- Stale stats swapped for current, sourced figures
- Dated examples and references brought up to date
- Honest "last updated" and review signals added
- datePublished and dateModified schema fixed clean
- A real content update, not a touched date
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A freshness read, not a rewrite.
The grader runs in your browser and reads only the page or text you give it. Here's where the line sits.
The free tool does
- Reads published, modified and schema dates from the live page
- Flags future dates, missing dates and visible-vs-schema mismatches
- Checks for real update signals, not just a changed date
- Finds stale stats and old-year data points
- Spots dated examples and time-relative phrasing that ages
- Writes a clean "last updated" line and date schema you can paste in
It deliberately does not
- Verify any stat against its original primary source
- Find the current figure to replace a stale one
- Rewrite the dated sections or examples
- Decide for you whether a date change is honest
- Crawl your whole site or pull Search Console data
- Refresh the page so it ships clean
Five checks, each tied to primary evidence.
Every category maps to something Google has filed, leaked or published. The weights reflect how much each signal tends to move the needle. Treat the scores as directional, not a ranking guarantee.
Checks for a published date, a last-modified date and matching dates in your structured data, and flags future dates or a modified date that predates publication. Google's 2019 guidance is to show a clear date and use the same date in structured data and the visible page. Google's "document inception date" patent treats the date as an input to scoring.
Looks for evidence of a real revision: an "updated" or "reviewed" line, a change note, current-year references in the body. The 2024 Google API leak revealed a lastSignificantUpdate field, which records the last substantive change. John Mueller has said changing the date alone "wouldn't rank those pages differently." A fresh date over stale content is the pattern this check is built to catch.
Scans for data points tied to old years and for statistics with no year at all. This is our own editorial standard: any stat older than roughly 12 months gets checked against a newer figure from the same source, or swapped. A current, sourced number also tends to win featured snippets.
Flags dated examples and time-relative phrasing ("a few years ago", "as of 2021", "these days") that ages badly. This is a practitioner heuristic, not a Google rule: pinning claims to a fixed, current date reads as fresher to both readers and search systems.
Weighs how much freshness should matter for this topic. The "query deserves freshness" idea, which then-Google engineer Amit Singhal described to the New York Times in 2007, holds that some queries reward recency and others do not. Mueller has also said Google does not broadly favor fresh content, so an evergreen page is not penalized here for an older date.
Primary sources, first-hand.
Every claim above traces to a Google filing, a leaked internal document or Google's own published guidance. No second-hand SEO blog stands in for the source.
Document scoring based on document inception date (US7840572B2 / US8521749B2)
Google's own filing. The system "determines a document inception date," generates a score "based, at least in part, on the document inception date," and ranks the document against others on that score. This is the origin of date as a ranking input.
Document scoring based on document content update (US8234273B2 / US8549014B2)
Google's filing on how content changes over time affect a score. In its words, "a document whose content is edited often may be scored differently than a document whose content remains static." The rate and substance of updates matter, not the date stamp alone.
Google Content Warehouse API leak: date attributes
The leaked module definitions name the real date fields Google computes: bylineDate, syntacticDate, semanticDate and lastSignificantUpdate. The last one records the last substantive change, evidence that Google separates a real revision from a touched date. The attribute names are Google's; this page mirrors the raw definitions.
Help Google Search know the best date for your web page
Google Search Central's own post. Show a clear date, and "use the same date in structured data and in the visible part of the page." It also tells publishers not to "artificially 'freshen' a story without adding significant information." Google in the first person on fake freshness.
John Mueller on changing dates and freshness
Google's John Mueller: Google "wouldn't rank those pages differently in search just because you're changing the date and time on a page." Asked separately whether Google favors fresh content, he answered no, noting fresh pages are crawled more often, which is not the same as ranked higher.
About the grader.
Does Google actually reward fresh content?
Sometimes, and it depends on the query. Google's John Mueller has said Google does not broadly favor fresh content, but Google's own patents score a document partly on its inception date and on how its content changes. The practical read: time-sensitive topics reward recency, evergreen topics reward accuracy. This tool weights freshness by the topic type you pick.
Will changing the date on my page improve rankings?
No, not on its own. John Mueller said Google "wouldn't rank those pages differently" just for a changed date, and the 2024 API leak revealed a lastSignificantUpdate field that records real changes, not cosmetic ones. Update the date when you genuinely revise the content. That is what the Update Substance check looks for.
Can I check any URL?
Most public pages work. We fetch the page once and read its text, tags and date markup. Pages behind a login, a paywall or heavy bot protection may not load, and a page with no readable HTML returns an error. If a URL will not load here, confirm it opens in a normal browser tab first.
Where does the tool get the dates from?
In URL mode our server reads the page once and pulls dates from your JSON-LD (datePublished, dateModified), your meta tags (article:published_time and similar) and any visible time elements. If a page has none of these, the tool flags it, because search engines then have nothing to judge freshness by.
Does it verify my stats are still accurate?
No. It flags stats tied to old years and stats with no year, so you know what to check. Confirming a number means opening the original source and finding the current figure, which is human work. Our AI Fact Checker screens claims in more detail, and the done-for-you service does the verification and the swap.
Is my content stored anywhere?
No. The analysis runs in your browser. When you check a URL, our server fetches that page once to hand the text, tags and dates back to your browser, and nothing is logged or saved.
How does this relate to your other free tools?
This one is focused on freshness. For the broad read across AI citation readiness, E-E-A-T and on-page basics, run the On-Page SEO Grader. For a claim-by-claim screen of every stat and date, run the AI Fact Checker.