It's hard to tell if they use it. Most of SEO is just cargo-culting because of how difficult it is to experiment with it. Somebody once said it helped them to r

It's hard to tell if they use it. Most of SEO is just cargo-culting because of how difficult it is to experiment with it. Somebody once said it helped them to remove the date, and now everyone does it. Maybe google is using it, or was using it at some point. Maybe they use the date in structured data [1] because it's easier to get and potentially more reliable (telling content changes and theme changes apart isn't trivial), and people just noticed that if they turn off the date feature in their CMS their articles rank better. 1: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/article https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structu...