Stale content, date conflicts, and missing freshness signals.

Content Freshness

Content freshness is a ranking factor for many query types. Google uses date signals — datePublished, dateModified, and Last-Modified headers — to determine when content was last updated. Stale content (over a year old without updates), conflicting date signals (dateModified older than datePublished), and missing dates all hurt your search visibility. EchoBat cross-references all date signals on every page to identify freshness issues.

How It Works

EchoBat extracts date metadata from JSON-LD structured data (datePublished, dateModified), HTTP Last-Modified headers, and HTML meta tags on every page. The Freshness lens cross-references all available date signals, flags conflicts, identifies stale content, and detects missing or future-dated entries.

Proof Returned in the Report

Every Content Freshness finding is tied to crawl evidence: affected URLs, the source signal, severity, score impact, and the next action exposed in the portal, CLI JSON, and MCP tools.

Sample Evidence Fields

  • Stale Content: Pages with content over 365 days old that may need updating to stay competitive.
  • Conflicting Date Signals: datePublished vs dateModified vs Last-Modified header disagreements.
  • Missing Freshness Signals: Pages with no date metadata — search engines can't assess content age.

Why It Matters

  • Surface content that hasn't been updated in over a year
  • Catch date signal conflicts that confuse search engines
  • Find pages missing freshness signals entirely
  • Identify future-dated content for correction

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