Freshness Checker — does your page expose machine-readable dates?

What does the freshness check look for?

It checks both that you expose dates in a form machines can read and that the content itself is reasonably current. Specifically:

• Machine-readable dates — datePublished and dateModified in Article schema, or article:modified_time meta tags.
• A visible date — a human-readable "published" or "updated" date on the page.
• Actual currency — content that reflects current facts, not a recent date stamped on stale information.

A machine-readable date plus reasonably fresh content passes; a date that's only human-readable, or present but on stale content, is a warning; no machine-readable date is a fail.

How is it evaluated, and how is it scored?

GEObubbly looks for datePublished/dateModified in structured data, article:modified_time meta, or a visible date, and weighs it against signs of currency. It's a core GEO / LLM Readiness check worth 3 points, because freshness is one of the signals answer engines weight most heavily when choosing which sources to cite.

Why freshness matters for GEO

AI platforms favour recent content, often dramatically. Analyses of AI citations have found that fresher pages can be cited far more than older ones, especially for commercial and fast-moving topics. To benefit, you have to do two things: actually be fresh, and signal it in a way machines can read. Expose your dates in machine-readable form — datePublished and dateModified in Article schema, or article:modified_time meta — plus a visible date on the page; a page that was genuinely updated but doesn't expose a date gets no credit for it. And keep the content itself current: refresh stats, dates and claims, because a machine-readable "updated" date on stale content is worse than nothing if the content contradicts what's now true. Freshness compounds with the rest of GEO / LLM Readiness — a regularly updated, dated, well-structured page is exactly what an answer engine reaches for when assembling a current answer.