Quality and evidence · Branch Q.D, Freshness and AI production discipline
Q-08 Freshness signals must reflect real substantive updates
dateModified, lastmod and visible 'updated' dates must not be refreshed cosmetically without a real content change.
- Scope
- All public content
- Priority
- High priority.
- Quality bucket
- Freshness and maintenance plan
- Legacy coverage
- SEO-10, GEO-30
Why it matters
A fresh date on unchanged content misleads readers into trusting out-of-date prices, specifications or rules. Search engines and AI answer engines that use dates to judge freshness are given a false signal. Keeping dates honest protects the trust the page has earned.
How to implement
- Update the content properly whenever prices, models or regulations change, and keep a changelog.
- Stop rewriting evergreen pages only to change the date.
- Link dateModified and the update timestamp to a real content diff.
- Configure the CMS so dateModified only changes on a substantive edit.
- Schedule validation of older facts so stale information is caught.
Checklist
- Make a real update when prices, models or regulations change.
- Keep a changelog.
- Do not rewrite evergreen content just to change the date.
- Keep dateModified in sync with real changes.
- Do not change the update timestamp unless there is a content diff.
- Record price, spec and regulation changes as real revisions.
- Tie dateModified automation in the CMS to a substantive change condition.
- Set up scheduled validation for older facts.
How to audit
- Compare the CMS or Git revision diff with the dateModified value.
- Compare the revision diff against the timestamp.
- Check a random sample for stale facts.
How UltimateSEO checks this automatically
Partly automated. The crawler compares dateModified in schema with the visible date and, where a previous crawl exists, sitemap lastmod with real content change; whether an update was substantive is confirmed by a person. The crawl gives a signal; a person decides the final state with business evidence.
States used: PASS, FAIL, UNKNOWN, NOT_APPLICABLE or BLOCKED. UNKNOWN is never shown as a pass. How states work.
Sources
Part of The UltimateSEO Framework v4.1, revised 2026-10-07. Evidence states, control states and the publish gate are explained on the hub.