Find when a website was published

There is no universal, reliable publication-date field for a web page. A visible date may be the original publication date, an update date, or a template value. Treat it as a clue and compare several signals.

Check the page source or structured data for datePublished and dateModified, inspect the RSS/Atom feed or sitemap, and look for the earliest dated version in an archive such as the Internet Archive. Search results can show a date, but search engines may infer it and it is not proof. Git history or a CMS revision history is stronger when you own the site.

How to find who published a website

The publisher is often easier to find than the date. Work through these steps:

1. Open the footer and the About or Contact page. Look for a company name, a person, or a legal notice (an imprint, privacy policy or terms page).
2. View the page source and search for publisher and author. Structured data may name an Organization or Person, and a <meta name="author"> tag may list a writer.
3. Check the byline on the article itself. Follow the author link to a profile page.
4. Look up the domain in RDAP or WHOIS (for example at lookup.icann.org). Many registrants are hidden by privacy services, so an empty result is common and proves nothing.
5. Look for the same name on the site's social profiles, and for a /humans.txt or /.well-known/security.txt file with a contact.

Name the publisher only when two sources agree. A domain owner, a hosting company and the author of a page can be three different parties.

Do not confuse a domain's registration date, a certificate's issue date, and a page's publication date. If you need to cite the result, record the URL, the date you checked it, and the evidence used. For site owners, expose accurate structured data and visible dates only when they reflect the editorial history; a modified timestamp should not be presented as the first publication date.

Sources

• Google Search Central — dates on pages

• Schema.org — datePublished