Blog/article schema includes dates

Freshness is one of the few signals AI-search vendors name in their own docs. Microsoft is explicit that staleness is worse in AI answers than in ranking — "In search, stale content degrades ranking. In grounding, a stale fact produces a misleading response" — and lists "regular updates" among its AI-citation guidance; Google describes its AI features as retrieving "up-to-date web pages from our Search index." The cross-vendor way to declare freshness is visible dates on the page (covered by publication-dates-visible) plus an accurate sitemap lastmod (Bing calls it "a key signal" for AI answers). datePublished/dateModified in Article or BlogPosting schema is the structured, Bing-side bonus on top of those: machine-readable dates generated from the same source as the visible ones, so the two never disagree.

Add Article or BlogPosting JSON-LD to each blog post with at least datePublished set. Generate the schema at render time from your post's frontmatter or CMS metadata so dates stay accurate.

// app/blog/[slug]/page.tsx
<script type="application/ld+json" dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: JSON.stringify({
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "BlogPosting",
  "headline": post.title,
  "datePublished": post.publishedAt,   // ISO 8601: "2026-04-02"
  "dateModified": post.updatedAt ?? post.publishedAt,
  "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": post.author }
})}} />

At minimum, datePublished is required. Including dateModified when content is updated signals freshness to AI systems more precisely — a post from 2024 updated in 2026 should reflect the 2026 dateModified date.