Is your site quietly going stale?
Search engines recrawl fresh sites more often. When nothing has changed in a year, pages are visited less, and rankings drift down. This reads the lastmod dates in your sitemap to see how current the site actually is.
Reads the lastmod dates your sitemap declares. Saved to your account if you are signed in to a paid plan.
How this check works
Shipwork reads the lastmod dates in your sitemap and reports how recent the newest one is. A sitemap whose newest date is over a year old signals a neglected site: crawled less, ranked lower. It is a directional signal from your own declarations, not a full content audit.
What the content freshness check reads
The check reads the lastmod dates declared in your sitemap, keeps the ones that parse as real dates, and finds the most recent. It reports how many days ago that date falls. If the newest date is more than a year old, it warns that the site may be going stale; otherwise it reports the age as a passing signal.
It reads dates the sitemap declares, not the dates on the pages themselves, and not the words in the content. A site that publishes often but never updates lastmod looks stale, and a site that updates lastmod without changing content looks fresh. The check is a directional signal from one source.
How to read a freshness finding
A warning means the sitemap's newest date is over 365 days old, which suggests the site is not being updated or the dates are not maintained. An ok result means the newest declared date is recent. Neither tells you whether the content is accurate, useful or complete.
The limitation matters. If you cannot maintain lastmod honestly, omitting it is better than publishing dates you do not update, because a wrong date misleads both the check and a crawler. A stale-looking sitemap is a prompt to review publishing, not proof that pages are weak.
Why freshness is a signal
Crawlers visit active sites more often, so a site that shows recent changes tends to be recrawled sooner and can index new work faster. For a blog, a documentation set or a publisher, a sitemap whose newest date is a year old suggests there is nothing new to collect, so revisits slow down.
Freshness is not the same as quality. A page can be old and accurate, and updating a date without changing anything is not a real update. The signal is about activity, so it matters most when you actually publish new content and want it found. Used honestly, lastmod is the cheapest freshness signal a site controls.
Keep dates honest
Generate lastmod from the real modification time of each page rather than a fixed value, so it changes only when the content does. On Shopify and WooCommerce, a sitemap app or the platform's own sitemap produces these dates; check that it is enabled and current. If you edit a page, the date should move; if you only edit a template, it should not.
If your platform cannot produce trustworthy dates, omit lastmod instead of inventing them. For sites that publish on a schedule, confirm the sitemap is refreshed after each publish. Use sitemap check to confirm the file is valid and current, and sitemap lastmod for the date detail.
When to use related checks
Use content quality when the question is whether the content itself is strong enough, since freshness does not measure that. Use orphan pages check and sitemap check to confirm the URLs and dates you rely on are actually in the sitemap.
The guide freshness and content updates explains when updating content helps and when it does not. If the concern is that pages exist but are not linked, treat freshness and orphans as separate questions.
Questions
Why does freshness matter?
Where does the date come from?
Is this a full content audit?
How do I check if my site is going stale?
Does updating a page without changing content help?
Should I remove lastmod if I cannot maintain it?
Keep reading
What this reads
- Reads public pages from outside your network, the way a crawler does.
- No signup, and nothing is stored on the free checks.
- One of 83 checks across discovery, content, markup, trust and catalogue data.
Cool, just ran an audit and got some insights! Let’s see if I can fix them :)
Whoah! this site is crazy, nothing to roast at all
cool as heck, tried it on my blog and the insights it gave are helpful and not bluff.