Entity SEO
Make your company unambiguous to machines
- Trust
Stage 3: Trust
Author and freshness signals check
Who an article says wrote it and when, read from the byline, the dates on the page, the schema and the response headers, with every disagreement listed.
Free to use. No login, nothing stored.
What it checks
Trust- Visible byline, and whether it names the same person as the schema author
- author on Article, BlogPosting or NewsArticle schema: type, name, url or sameAs, and one fetch of the author page
- Visible published and updated dates against datePublished and dateModified
- Open Graph article:published_time and article:modified_time, and the Last-Modified header
- Days since the last declared change, and the copyright year in the footer
- A JSON-LD author and date snippet to copy, filled from what the page shows
Method question for this stage: Is expertise visible and backed by evidence?
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Results
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- Info
Three groups: Page, Author, Freshness
What the page fetched and which schema it carries; the byline, the schema author and whether they agree; the visible, structured, Open Graph and header dates and whether they agree.
Bylines and dates help readers and crawlers identify who wrote what and when. Google documents them as helpful and uses structured-data dates for display in results; no vendor documents that they cause citations by AI assistants. The snippet below is filled from what the page shows; replace every bracketed value before using it.
How we check
The rules this tool tests, and where they come from
A result is a check against a published rule, not a prediction. Every row shows its working.
Rules and sources
- Google: Article structured data (author and date properties)
- Google: influence your byline dates in Google Search
- Google: creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (who, how and why)
- Schema.org: Person
Links go to the operator's or standards body's own documentation. We do not link to third-party summaries.
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Next step
Fix what it finds
This check belongs to the Trust stage of the Crawl-to-Citation Method. The service below covers the fix; the Diagnostic ranks it against everything else.
Most engagements start with the Search Visibility Diagnostic ($2,500).
It covers all six method stages, so what this tool finds is ranked against everything else before you commit to any work.
Book the diagnosticAuthor and date questions
What Google documents about bylines and dates, quoted, and what this check cannot see.
Still have questions? Book a callWhy should the dates agree everywhere?
Google describes the date it shows in results as "the date that Google estimates that the web page was updated or published" and says it "doesn't depend on a single date factor because all factors can be prone to issues". Its byline-dates page then asks you to "Ensure that the date (and optional time and timezone) match between the equivalent user-visible and structured values" and to "Minimize the presence of other dates on the page". When the visible date, datePublished, dateModified and the Open Graph tags say different things, the estimate has to pick one of them. This tool lists each value and flags pairs more than one day apart; the one-day allowance for time zones is our choice, not Google's.
Should the author be an Organization or a Person?
Whichever is true. Google's Article structured data page says: "Use the Person type for people, and the Organization type for organizations. Don't use the Thing type, and don't use the wrong type (for example, using the Organization type for a person)." A staff-written piece with no named writer can carry the newsroom as an Organization author; a piece with a byline should carry that person, and "all the authors that are presented as authors on the web page" should be in the markup, each in their own author field. The publisher's name belongs in the publisher property, not inside author.name. Schema.org defines Person as "A person (alive, dead, undead, or fictional)" and sameAs as a "URL of a reference Web page that unambiguously indicates the item's identity", which is why the tool asks for a url or sameAs on the author.
Does changing the date without changing the content help?
Google says not to. Its Article page defines dateModified as "The date and time the article was most recently modified", and its byline-dates page says "The dates must describe the publication or update date of the page, not the stories or events described therein." Its Publisher Center best practices for article pages are more direct: "it's against our guidelines to artificially freshen a story when the publisher didn't add significant information", while noting that "If an article has been substantially changed, it can make sense to give it a fresh date and time." This tool cannot see whether the text changed; it reports the days since the declared change and leaves the judgement about staleness to you, because that depends on the topic.
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