CMSs lie about dates.
Some platforms touch dateModified on every cache rebuild. Some never set it at all. We show every raw date in the table so you can sanity check.
Free tool
Is your page quietly going stale?
Drop in a URL. We dig out every last modified date the page is hiding, score the decay, and tell you exactly when to refresh.
One free audit per day. Resets at 00:00 UTC.
How it works
One URL. Six date signals. Thirty seconds.
- 1
Paste the URL
Drop in any public web page. We add https if you forget. Pick a topic or let us auto detect from the slug and title.
- 2
We sniff the page
JSON-LD, OG meta, microdata, HTTP headers, sitemap. We pull every freshness signal and pick the most trustworthy one.
- 3
You get a verdict
A one word verdict, an age in days, a decay score, a recommended next refresh window, and a short list of action items.
What we measure
Four numbers. One picture of decay.
Skip the vanity counters. These are the four things that decide whether a page still has a heartbeat.
- Last modified date
- We pull every freshness signal the page carries. JSON-LD. Open Graph. Microdata. HTTP headers. Sitemap. Then we pick the one most likely to be true.
- Age in days
- Calendar math from today back to the best date we found. The number that quietly decides whether a model still wants to quote you.
- Decay score
- A 0 to 1 score against per topic horizons. News dies fast. Evergreen guides hold. We surface the score so you can argue with it if you want.
- Update cadence
- A concrete next refresh window in days plus a cadence label. So the next sprint planning meeting writes itself.
Reading the verdict
Crisp. Fading. Stale. Pick one.
Three bands so you can act without doing the math. Horizons change by topic because a news post and a 5,000 word reference do not age the same way.
| Verdict | Score | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Crisp. | Score 0.7 or higher | Inside the fresh window for its topic. Engines treat this as current. Keep an eye on it but no rush. |
| Fading. | Score 0.3 to 0.7 | Past its prime. Still indexed. Not yet rotting. A small update now is way cheaper than a rewrite later. |
| Stale. | Score under 0.3 | The model has likely already replaced you with someone newer. Refresh, restructure, or delete. Doing nothing is also a choice. |
| Topic | Fresh up to | Stale by |
|---|---|---|
| News or blog | 14 days | 90 days |
| Review or comparison | 90 days | 270 days |
| How-to or guide | 180 days | 540 days |
| Evergreen reference | 365 days | 900 days |
Where it breaks
This is a heuristic. Read it like one.
Honesty beats hype. Here is what this tool is and is not.
Sitemap lastmod is a soft signal.
Plenty of sitemap generators bump lastmod whenever the build runs. We use it as a last resort, never as the headline.
No traffic data in this version.
This free tool does not look at your real rankings or GSC traffic. It scores how the page presents itself. Good enough to triage. Not the same as actual decay.
JS-only sites look empty.
If your page renders entirely in the browser with no SSR meta, we will see a thin shell and almost no signals. Add server side meta tags. Both Google and the LLMs prefer them.
Who uses this
Built for people who refuse to let good content rot.
SEO leads
Triage your top 50 ranking pages. Refresh the stale ones first. Stop pretending an article from 2022 still pulls weight.
Solo bloggers
Run it on your evergreen hits. Find out which posts the engines have quietly stopped trusting. Republish before traffic dies.
Agencies
Drop in a client URL during a pitch. Show the verdict on the call. Walk out with a quarter of update work pre sold.
Content teams
Keep a refresh queue. The score tells you what to attack this sprint. The action items tell you what to actually change.
Inside COMAS’
Auditing one URL is easy. Not letting the next one go stale is the work.
This free tool is the snapshot. The COMAS’ pipeline keeps you out of the stale band by writing fresh, sourced articles on a cadence. In your brand voice. With AIO summaries baked in.
Run this audit on the URLs that already rank. Use the result to brief the agents on what to publish next. Then watch new pages take the slots that old ones used to own.
FAQ
The questions you were going to ask.
Real questions. Honest answers. No marketing fluff.
What is content decay?
Content decay is what happens when a page that used to rank or get cited slowly stops doing either. Search engines and LLMs prefer recent, well sourced pages. The web gets new ones every minute. Yours has to keep up or it slides down the rankings.
Where do you get the last modified date?
From the page itself. We read the HTTP Last-Modified header, the article and og meta tags, JSON-LD dateModified, schema.org microdata, and the sitemap entry. We pick the most trustworthy one and show you all the rest in a table so you can spot a CMS that is lying to you.
Is the decay score real or made up?
It is a transparent rule based heuristic. Per topic horizons in days, then simple math. We do not look at your actual rankings or traffic in this free version. The COMAS dashboard does. The score here is a strong directional signal you can act on in 30 seconds.
Why one check per day?
Because abuse is a real thing and we like running this for free. The cap resets at 00:00 UTC. If you need to audit a list of pages, the COMAS dashboard runs the same logic across every project page on a schedule.
My page has zero dates. What do I do?
Add dateModified to your JSON-LD. Set article:modified_time and og:updated_time. It is a one line CMS change for most sites and it gives both Google and the LLMs a clean signal to trust. Until then, we cannot score what we cannot see.
Do you store the URL I check?
We store a hashed visitor IP, the date, the audited URL, and its host. So the daily cap works and so we can analyze anonymized usage. The full audit result is not retained. Each check is a fresh fetch.
How is this different from the COMAS dashboard?
This free tool checks one URL on demand. The COMAS' dashboard runs the same audit across every page in a project, on a schedule, and pairs the freshness score with real ranking deltas so you know which stale pages are actually losing money.
How do I actually fix a stale page?
Three moves. One. Update statistics and add a 2026 angle to the intro. Two. Re-link to primary sources that are still online. Three. Bump dateModified in your JSON-LD so the engines know you cared.
Now what
Stale content does not fix itself.
COMAS’ is a team of agents that writes fresh, structured, sourced articles on a cadence that keeps your category in your name. Not someone else’s.