Answer engines strongly prefer content they can date. Undated pages are hard to judge for freshness and are cited less.
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How this rule is weighted
- Importance
- 5 / 10
- How much this matters relative to other rules.
- Confidence
- RESEARCH
- Backed by large-sample study or industry research, not a specification.
- Severity
- warning
- How the finding is presented when it fails.
- Scoring
- Excluded
- Reported in the report, never penalised.
Impact is importance multiplied by the confidence tier’s weight — SPECIFICATION 1.0, RESEARCH 0.7, EMERGING 0.3, EXPERIMENTAL 0.1. Two rules backed by the same class of evidence therefore always carry the same weight, which is what makes the score reproducible rather than hand-tuned.
Questions about this rule
- Does AEO_DATE_PUBLISHED affect my score?
- No. It is a detection rule: it runs, appears in your report and never penalises you. "Publication date declared" is information about the page rather than a defect - most pages are not expected to satisfy it.
- What does RESEARCH confidence mean?
- Backed by large-sample study or industry research, not a specification. Confidence is a declared tier rather than a per-rule number, so every rule backed by the same class of evidence carries the same weight - which is what makes the score reproducible instead of hand-tuned.
- How do I check AEO_DATE_PUBLISHED on my own site?
- Paste your URL into the box above and it runs only this rule, usually in a couple of seconds. It is also included in the Answer Engine checker and in a full scan.
Tags
- aeo
- freshness
Related Answer Engine rules
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- FAQPage schema presentFAQPage JSON-LD gives answer engines a structured, unambiguous question/answer pair to cite directly.AEO_FAQ_SCHEMA
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