How is this check scored?
Every threshold on this page comes from one source: the citation-readiness scorer Gadex publishes. Per Gadex's own build, the weights below are read directly from that scorer and a test fails the build if the documented figure stops matching the applied one. A pass earns the full 8 points, a warning earns half, a fail earns none.
| Result | How it is decided |
|---|---|
| Pass | A full date appears: 2026-08-10, 10 August 2026, August 10, 2026, or 10/08/2026. |
| Warn | Only a bare year appears anywhere on the page. |
| Fail | No date pattern at all. |
Why does this check exist?
Almost every claim has a shelf life, and a model has no way to weigh one without knowing when it was made. An undated page is not just less trustworthy — it is cheaper to skip in favour of a dated one that says something similar.
A bare year is a partial signal, which is why it earns partial credit. "2026" tells a reader the page is not ancient and nothing more precise than that.
The check wants a date on the page, not only in the markup, because the reader deciding whether to trust the page cannot see your structured data.
How do you fix it?
- Show a published date, an updated date, or both. Where they differ, both is more useful than either.
- Write the month as a word — "10 August 2026" — so the meaning does not depend on whether the reader assumes day-first or month-first.
- Set the date from the content, never from the build. See the FAQ below: this is the failure mode most worth avoiding.
How often do pages fail this check?
Per Gadex's own measurement across the 91 content pages on this site, using the checker published at /tools/ai-search-visibility-checker/: 67 pass, 21 carry a warning, and 3 fail. Per that same run, 26 per cent of Gadex pages have something to fix on this check alone.
Those figures include the pages Gadex fails. A checker whose author exempts itself from the checking is marketing rather than measurement, so the numbers are generated from the built site on every deploy and the build fails if the published figures stop matching what Gadex actually scores. When Gadex fixes pages, the numbers move on their own.
What does this check miss?
- The check reads any full date on the page. A date inside a quoted statistic can satisfy it even where the page itself is undated.
- It cannot tell a publication date from an update date, or either from a date mentioned in passing.
- It has no opinion on whether the date is true. That is the next section.
Where does this guidance come from?
The scoring rules are Gadex's. The reasoning about why these properties matter draws on the platforms' own published guidance:
- Google Search Central: creating helpful, reliable, people-first content — on self-evident expertise, sourcing, and who the content is for.
- Google Search Central: Article structured data — on author and date fields, and what they are used for.
- OpenAI: bots and crawlers — on how ChatGPT fetches and attributes pages it surfaces.
How we measured this
The counts above come from running the Gadex scorer over the built HTML of every content page on this site, reading each page's main content region only — nav, header and footer links are excluded, because a visitor pastes an article rather than a whole document. Legal boilerplate, the 404 page and generated tool result renderings are excluded as pages where the score would be meaningless. Per that run, the 91 pages counted are the ones a reader could plausibly ask an assistant to summarise.
The scoring thresholds on this page are read from the same module the tool runs, and a test fails the build if the weight documented here stops matching the weight the scorer applies. What none of this can tell you is whether an answer engine will cite a page: citation depends on the model, the prompt, the index and the competing sources, none of which is visible in your markup.
Common questions
Can we just print the build date so pages always look fresh?
No, and this is the most consequential answer on the page. A date stamped at build time claims the content changed when it did not. It defeats the purpose of the signal: if every page updates on every deploy, the date stops distinguishing anything, and a crawler that notices is entitled to discount your dates entirely. Gadex shipped this bug on 21 of its own guide pages and removed it — the fix was a hand-maintained constant and a CI check that fails if any page reads the clock while rendering.
What if a page has not changed in two years but is still correct?
Then its date should say two years ago. A stable definition does not need to look recent, and backdating the problem by faking a refresh is worse than an old date on a page that is still right.
Does a date in JSON-LD count?
Not for this check. Structured data is stripped before scoring, so the date has to be visible. Emit both, but treat the visible one as the claim.