How do I find the date of an article when it doesn't say?

Most pages that hide the date on screen still keep it in their code: structured data (JSON-LD), meta tags like article:published_time, or an HTML time tag. Paste the URL into this checker to read all of them at once. If the code has no date either, open the URL in the Wayback Machine: the first snapshot shows the page existed by that day. Google's before: and after: search operators can narrow it down further.

How do I find the date a website was published?

A website doesn't have one publish date, but each page usually does. Check the specific article URL here. For the site as a whole, the earliest Wayback Machine snapshot of the homepage and the domain's WHOIS registration date give you a rough starting point.

Is the Last-Modified date the publish date?

No. Last-Modified is an HTTP header sent by the server. On most modern sites it changes every time the site is deployed or the cache is refreshed, so it often shows yesterday's date on a ten-year-old post. This tool lists it as a weak signal and never uses it as the publish or update date.

Can a website fake its publish date?

Yes. A site can backdate a post, or update the content without changing the date. The dates this tool finds are what the site claims. When the stakes are high, compare them against the first Wayback Machine snapshot, which the site cannot change.

How do I cite a web page with no date?

Use n.d. (no date) in place of the year. In APA, that looks like: Author, A. (n.d.). Title of page. Site Name. URL. MLA leaves the date out and adds the date you accessed the page at the end. Before you settle on n.d., check the page's code and the Wayback Machine, since many undated pages have a date in their metadata.

Why did the tool find two different publish dates?

Usually because the page was republished, migrated to a new CMS, or syndicated from another site. The structured data might keep the original date while a meta tag shows the republish date, or the reverse. The tool picks the most reliable source, shows every date it found, and warns you when they disagree.

When Was This Article Published? Free Date Checker

How it works

Paste the URL of a specific article. The checker loads the page the way a search engine would and reads every place a date can hide, in order of how much we trust it:

Structured data (JSON-LD). The datePublished and dateModified fields that sites add for Google. Most WordPress, Ghost, Webflow and news sites have it.
Meta tags. article:published_time, article:modified_time, og:updated_time, plus older or niche ones like pubdate, DC.date.issued, sailthru.date and parsely-pub-date.
HTML time tags. A <time datetime="..."> element, especially one marked itemprop="datePublished" or with a "published" or "updated" class.
The URL. Paths like /2024/03/15/ or /2024/03/ are set when the post is created and rarely change.
The Last-Modified header. Shown for completeness, labelled as a weak signal, never used as the answer.

You get the published date, the last-updated date, a confidence level, and the full list of dates found with the exact field each came from. When two sources agree, confidence goes up. When they disagree, you get a warning instead of a silent pick.

A real-looking example

Say you check a SaaS blog post at example-saas.com/blog/cold-email-benchmarks/. The page shows no date anywhere on screen. The checker returns:

	Date	Source
Published	February 11, 2025, 2:03 PM UTC	JSON-LD `datePublished (Article)`
Last updated	September 30, 2025	JSON-LD `dateModified (Article)`
Also found	February 11, 2025	Meta tag `article:published_time`
Not used	October 21, 2026	Last-Modified header (the last deploy)

Confidence: high, because the structured data and the meta tag agree. The header says the page changed today, but that's the hosting platform redeploying, not someone editing the article. If you had trusted it, you would have cited a 2025 post as brand new.

Where dates hide on a page

Many blogs remove dates from the visible design. The reasoning is usually that "evergreen" content looks stale once a reader sees it's three years old. The date rarely disappears from the page's code, though, because Google and social networks ask for it. That's why "view source and search for 2024" works so often, and why this checker finds a date on most pages that look undated.

If you want to check by hand: right-click, View Page Source, and search for datePublished, published_time or <time.

Why a page can show no date

Some pages genuinely have none:

Landing pages, docs and product pages. They're updated continuously, so there's no single publish date to give.
Custom or old CMSes that never added structured data or Open Graph tags.
Pages built in the browser. If the content loads with JavaScript after the page opens, the dates may not be in the HTML we read.
Sites that block automated requests. If a site rejects our request, you'll see an error rather than a result.

When nothing turns up, the fallbacks are:

The Wayback Machine. Open web.archive.org/web/*/ followed by the URL. The earliest snapshot proves the page existed by that day, so the article was published on or before it.
Google's date operators. Search the article title in quotes with before:2024-01-01 or after:2023-06-01, and move the dates until it appears and disappears.
Comments and shares. The oldest comment, or the first time the link was posted on social media, also gives you an upper bound.

How to cite a page with no date

If you've checked the code and the archives and still have nothing, cite it as undated:

APA: Author, A. (n.d.). Title of the page. Site Name. URL
MLA: Author. "Title of the Page." Site Name, URL. Accessed 21 Oct. 2026.
Chicago: include "n.d." and the access date.

If you found the date in the page's metadata, use it: that's the date the publisher put on record, even if it isn't printed on screen.

The limits

Every date here is a claim made by the site. Some things to keep in mind:

Sites can backdate posts, or rewrite them without touching the date. The Wayback Machine is the only independent check.
"Last updated" is often cosmetic. Some plugins bump dateModified every time a typo is fixed or a widget changes, which makes old content look fresh.
Republished and migrated posts sometimes keep the original date in one place and the new one in another. You'll see both, with a warning.
Last-Modified is usually the deploy time. On Vercel, Netlify or behind a CDN, it reflects when the site was last built or cached, not when anyone wrote anything.
Time zones. We show the date as the site wrote it. A post published at 11 PM in New York is dated that day, even though it was already the next day in UTC.

Found the date? Find who wrote it

If you're checking the date because you want to cite, quote or contact the source, the next question is usually who wrote it. The author finder takes the same URL and returns the author's name and the best available contact.

If you're dating articles to decide which ones are worth asking for a link, that's the part Mentiohunt does continuously: it finds backlink opportunities for your site and runs the outreach up to the first reply. The free preview shows a few opportunities and why each fits, without sending anything.

When Was This Article Published?

Find the date. Then check where it came from.

Dates appear after the check.