site.sitemap-lastmod-future

InfoSEO auditcrawl

Sitemap <lastmod> values lie in the future. Google uses lastmod only when it is consistently accurate.

What to change

Set <lastmod> to when the page's content last changed, not to the build time plus an offset or a publish date to come.

The documentation on developers.google.com

A finding of this rule on a page carries the exact edits for that page: the markup it quotes, and what to write instead.

When it runs

Runs on a crawl or a build directory. Info is a best practice: worth doing, rarely urgent, and --no-info leaves it out. Each finding takes 1 point off the page's score.

The severity here is the rule's usual one: a finding can be raised or lowered when the page gives a reason.

Run it, or skip it

Check a page for this rule alone, after a fix for instance:

npx @rivi-software/agentic-seo-check crawl https://example.com --rule site.sitemap-lastmod-future

Or from an assistant, with the MCP tool seo_crawl_site:

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "rules": [
    "site.sitemap-lastmod-future"
  ]
}

To leave it out of an audit, pass --disable site.sitemap-lastmod-future on the command, or disableRules: ["site.sitemap-lastmod-future"] to a tool.

All 49 rules