What is a content freshness checker?

A content freshness checker analyses pages one by one and determines when each page was updated most recently. ACME.BOT scans XML sitemap, pulls lastmod date information, and generates a URL section treemap highlighting content recency with color codes - green for less than 30 days, yellow for 91-180 days, red for more than a year.

How does the content freshness checker work?

ACME.BOT scans a robots.txt to discover the sitemap, walks through all of sitemap indexes recursively, and records the lastmod date for each URL. ACME.BOT groups pages by the top-level path segment - e.g. /blog/, /docs/, /products/ and uses the age of each page to bucket them into a freshness category. Output: an interactive treemap starting with a Freshness Score for every section (0-100).

What is a Freshness Score?

Up-to-date section score that ranges from 0-100. Scores are derived from each page's lastmod dates. 100 = fresh (under 30 days), 75 = recent (30-90 days), 50 = aging (91-180 days), 25 = stale (181-365 days), 0 = decaying (over 365 days). The section score is a weighted average across all pages with lastmod dates.

How does content freshness affect SEO and AI rankings?

Freshness is the 6th biggest Google ranking factor. Pages updated at least once per year gain an average of 4.6 ranking positions versus stagnant content. The effect is stronger for AI search: 76.4% of pages most-cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity were updated within 30 days, and AI-cited content is 25.7% fresher than traditional Google results.

Can I scan a competitor’s website?

Yes — the tool works on any sitemap that's public. Just plug in a competitor's domain, and ACME.BOT automatically finds their sitemap. Then view stale sections, which show where fresher alternatives could outrank them.

What if a sitemap doesn’t have lastmod dates?

ACME.BOT still displays content structure — pages by section with counts — but the treemap renders gray, since freshness can't be determined without dates. Most CMS platforms provide lastmod dates by default. If yours are missing, check your CMS sitemap settings or sitemap plugin.

Is there a limit on how many pages the tool scans?

Scans for each site are capped at 5,000 URLs — enough to capture the full sitemap for most sites. Larger sites are only partially scanned and a note is presented displaying the total number of URLs.

How is this different from Screaming Frog or Ahrefs?

Screaming Frog is a desktop app and exports lastmod as a CSV file – which means you have to manually create section scores and visualizations in Excel. Ahrefs requires a $99+/mo subscription. ACME.BOT is free, runs in-browser, and creates an interactive treemap and section-level Freshness Score within seconds.

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Check Your Content Freshness

ACME.BOT scans a sitemap and checks every page's freshness — color-coded by age, scored by section. Fresh pages glow green, stale ones turn red. Free, instant, no signup.Enter a domain. See every page's age, color-coded and scored.