Find when any webpage was published or updated.
Paste any article or webpage URL to find its published and last-modified dates. We check metadata, schema, sitemaps, headers, and archives, then show you every source with a plain-language explanation of its strength.
We fetch the page you paste and analyze publicly available metadata. The scheme is optional, so example.com/post works as well as the full address, and a URL that redirects is followed to the page it lands on. Read the methodology for how each signal is scored. Your URL is not saved.
Every date, every source, every reason.
Most date tools show one number and hope you trust it. Page Date Finder shows every signal we found, ranks each one against a published methodology, and calls out conflicts when they exist.
Twelve signal families
JSON-LD, Open Graph, Schema.org microdata, HTML <time>, Dublin Core, generic meta, visible bylines, URL patterns, the site's RSS/Atom feed, XML sitemap <lastmod>, HTTP Last-Modified, and the earliest Wayback Machine capture.
Confidence you can inspect
Every tier (strong, moderate, weak, floor) has a defined weight. When sources disagree by more than a day, we call it out and drop the confidence.
SSRF-safe, size-capped fetching
Private IPs, localhost, and metadata endpoints are blocked. Requests are bounded by a size and timeout budget, and result pages are never indexed.
Pick the tool that matches your task.
The finder above works for any URL. If you know the specific question you're asking, one of the focused variants below will get you there faster, and the last two work on many pages at once.
New to this? The guides cover where a publication date hides, how datePublished differs from dateModified, how Google picks the date it shows, and how to cite a page that appears to have no date.
- OpenPublish date finderThe first-published date on its own, with a table of where each platform stores it.
- OpenLast modified date checkerPrioritises modification signals and calls out the HTTP header caveat.
- OpendatePublished schema checkerOnly shows JSON-LD and microdata Schema.org signals, for SEO audits and structured-data validation.
- OpenBulk URL checkerPaste up to 500 URLs and export every title, date and confidence score as CSV.
- OpenBlog scannerPoint it at a blog and it finds the posts from the sitemap, feed or index, then dates up to 250.
Common questions.
- How does Page Date Finder decide the publication date?
- It checks JSON-LD Article.datePublished, Open Graph article:published_time, Schema.org microdata, HTML <time> elements, Dublin Core meta tags, common publication meta tags, visible bylines, URL patterns, the site's own RSS or Atom feed, sitemap <lastmod>, HTTP Last-Modified, and the earliest Wayback Machine capture. Every signal is shown with its strength; the verdict is the highest-tier value with agreement from other sources.
- How do I find out when an article was published?
- Paste its URL above. We fetch the page and read the publication date out of the places a content management system writes it: JSON-LD datePublished, the Open Graph article:published_time tag, Schema.org microdata, the visible byline, and the site's own sitemap and feed. That works even when the design prints no date, because taking the byline out of a template does not take the date out of the metadata behind it. To do it by hand instead, the guide on how to find when an article was published walks through the same evidence in order.
- How do I check the date of a link someone sent me?
- Paste the link itself, not the page you found it on. We follow the redirects, tell you the final URL we landed on, and give you the published and last-modified date for that page with a confidence score beside each one. A shortened link resolves to its destination first, so a bit.ly address works as well as the full one.
- When was this website published?
- That question usually means the domain registration date, which lives in WHOIS and is a different record from anything on the page. It also answers less than people expect: a domain registered in 2009 can serve an article written last week, and a 2009 registration says nothing about when the page you are reading appeared. We date the specific page you paste, so give us the URL of the article itself.
- Do you store my URLs or results?
- No. URLs are used to fetch the page and are not written to a database or logged with your identity. Result pages are not indexed by search engines.
- What if the sources disagree?
- When two moderate-or-stronger signals disagree by more than a day, a Conflict banner appears and the verdict confidence drops. Both values are shown side by side in the evidence list so you can judge which to trust.
Another 45 answers are on the full FAQ, and the methodology sets out the weight behind every tier.