Extract and use document dates for better retrieval

Document dates help Chathive rank results, newer documents appear higher by default, as they usually contain more accurate data than older documents. You can set dates in two ways:

1. Manually in Chathive

Open the document in Training Data.
Use the date picker to set a date.

If your website has date meta tags (see below), these will overwrite the manual date on the next crawl. To keep changes permanent, update your meta tags.

2. Automatically via Website Meta Tags

Chathive reads the Open Graph article:published_time tag in ISO 8601 format. Here are some examples of correct tags:

CODE

<!-- Full date + time + timezone -->
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2025-08-15T11:32:00+02:00" />

<!-- Extended date (YYYY-MM-DD) -->
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2025-08-15" />

<!-- Basic date (YYYYMMDD) -->
<meta property="article:published_time" content="20250815" />

Only the date is stored — time is ignored.

We currently only use article:published_time for ranking. However implementing the full Open Graph specification is good practice. It enhances SEO and enables Chathive to recognize more tags as we plan to read additional meta tags in the future.