Article schema and dateModified

01What is Article schema?

Article schema is structured data that describes a page as an article using the schema.org Article type or one of its subtypes. Google's Article structured data documentation says the markup can help Google understand the page and show better title text, images and date information in search results. It has no required properties; Google recommends adding the ones that apply.

Dates are the part of Article schema that matters most for freshness, and the part most often abused. This guide covers how the two date properties work, the honest rules for changing them, and what is and is not known about freshness in AI answers. It belongs to the AI answers section of the handbook, and the structured data basics on the home page cover the wider vocabulary.

02Article, NewsArticle or BlogPosting?

All three are Article types, and Google's Article, NewsArticle and BlogPosting page covers them together. Pick the one that matches the page; the choice does not change how dates are handled.

03What is the difference between datePublished and dateModified?

datePublished is the date and time the article was first published. dateModified is the date and time it was most recently modified. Both use ISO 8601 format, and Google's property reference recommends including a timezone, otherwise it assumes the timezone Googlebot uses.

The Article documentation describes dateModified as a property to add if you want to give Google more accurate date information, and notes that the Rich Results Test does not warn when it is missing. In other words, it is optional, and its value is only as good as its honesty.

datePublished should never move. If a page is rewritten so heavily that it is a new article, publish it as a new article at a new address or keep the original date and update dateModified.

04When should you change dateModified?

Change it when the content changes in a way a reader would care about: a corrected fact, a new section, updated steps, a revised recommendation. Do not change it for a typo, a new related link, a theme update or a sitewide footer change. Google's guidance on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content lists date changes without real updates among its warning signs.

Many WordPress setups update the modified date on every save, including trivial ones. If yours does, decide on an editorial rule, keep a short changelog line on the page for substantive updates, and make the markup follow that rule rather than the database timestamp.

05Visible dates must match the markup

Google's page on byline dates in Google Search says its systems look at several factors to estimate when a page was published or significantly updated, and that no single date factor is relied on. Its advice is to show a prominent, labelled date, such as "Published" or "Updated", and to mark the same dates up in a CreativeWork subtype like Article.

The byline date page adds two rules that catch many sites out. Do not use future dates or the date of the event the page describes. And if Google keeps picking the wrong date, reduce the number of other dates on the page, such as dates in related-post widgets or comment timestamps near the top.

A simple editorial check catches most problems: open the page, read the date a visitor sees, then view the source and read datePublished and dateModified. If they disagree, fix the template rather than the single page, because the same mismatch is probably on every post.

06Dates in WordPress

WordPress stores two dates for every post: the publish date and the last modified date. The modified date changes whenever the post is updated, including a one-character fix. Many themes print it as "Updated" and many SEO plugins copy it into dateModified, so a trivial save can make a page look freshly revised.

• Decide what counts as a substantive update, write it down, and apply it to every editor.
• If your theme or plugin lets you choose which date to show, show the last substantive update, not every save.
• Add a one-line changelog near the date for real updates, such as "Updated 4 November 2026: added the timezone rule".
• Check after a theme or plugin update that the visible date and the markup date still agree.

Common date mistakes

• A sitewide update, such as a new footer, bumping every post's modified date at once.
• datePublished set to the date of the event the article describes rather than the date it was published.
• A visible "Updated" date with no matching dateModified, or the other way round.
• Dates without a timezone on a site whose server and editors sit in different zones.

07How does freshness show in AI answers?

Google's guide to generative AI features on Search explains that its AI responses rely on retrieval from the Search index: core ranking systems retrieve relevant, up-to-date web pages, and the model reviews them to write the answer. Freshness, in that description, is a property of the retrieved pages, judged by the same systems that judge ordinary results.

No Google document says that a newer dateModified value, on its own, makes a page more likely to be cited. The honest position is that accurate dates help Google understand when a page was last updated, and that current, correct content is what a freshness-sensitive answer needs. Other engines do not document how they read dates at all. For the wider question, the guide to whether schema markup helps AI Overviews sets out what Google does and does not claim.

A visible "Updated" line with a short note of what changed also helps any quoted passage stay trustworthy, which the guide to quotable page structure covers.

08JSON-LD example

Values are examples. The author points to a Person described on the author page, as shown in the guide to Author and Person schema.

1{2  "@context": "https://schema.org",3  "@type": "Article",4  "headline": "Example Guide to Garden Soil Testing",5  "datePublished": "2026-03-14T09:00:00+00:00",26  "dateModified": "2026-11-04T16:30:00+00:00",37  "author": {8    "@id": "https://example.com/authors/example-author/#person"9  },10  "publisher": {11    "@id": "https://example.com/#organization"12  },13  "mainEntityOfPage": "https://example.com/guides/soil-testing/"14}