Content pages show dates
Why it matters
Freshness is one of the few citation factors an AI-search vendor names outright. Microsoft's grounding-index guidance puts it sharply — "In search, stale content degrades ranking. In grounding, a stale fact produces a misleading response" — and its AI-citation guidance lists regular updates among the factors that help content get referenced. A visible "published" or "last updated" date is how a page declares its recency to readers and to the systems extracting from it; undated content gives them nothing to assess.
Severity rationale
Medium because visible dates feed the freshness assessment Microsoft documents for AI answers, but their absence does not affect baseline discoverability.
Remediation
Render a visible publication or last-updated date on every blog post and documentation page. Use a semantic <time> element with a machine-readable dateTime attribute so both human readers and AI crawlers parsing HTML pick it up. Edit your post template in src/app/blog/[slug]/page.tsx or the docs layout.
<time dateTime="2026-04-02">April 2, 2026</time>
<p className="text-sm text-muted-foreground">Last updated: March 15, 2026</p>
DetectionPro
The detection method for this pattern is part of AuditBuffet Pro.
The full method (what to look for, pass and fail conditions, and how results get reported) ships inside the GEO Readiness Audit. The pattern definition, severity rationale, and remediation remain openly licensed under CC-BY-4.0.
External references
- external · bing-grounding-index — Bing — Evolving role of the index (a stale fact produces a misleading response)
Taxons
History
- 2026-04-18·v1.0.0·Initial import from geo-readiness·automated
- 2026-06-10·v1.0.1·Light-touch reframe: replaced unsourced "actively downrank" and the speculative "plays safe by citing what it can verify" mechanism with Microsofts documented freshness rationale ("a stale fact produces a misleading response"). Criteria unchanged.·by geo-first-party-alignment