The lastmod field tells a crawler when a page's content was meaningfully updated. It is not the time the sitemap was generated, the current date, or a request to crawl immediately.

Use the page date, not the build clock

  • For an unchanged article, keep its existing last-modified value.
  • When editorial content changes substantially, update the page's modification date and the matching sitemap entry.
  • Use the same date consistently across sitemap output and any visible updated-date label.

Avoid a noisy sitemap

Setting every URL to “now” on each deployment makes the signal less useful. A stable static site can generate sitemap XML during its build while retaining the real dates stored with each page.

<url>
  <loc>https://example.com/en/tutorials/example/</loc>
  <lastmod>2026-10-29</lastmod>
</url>

Validate the generated XML after a content release, confirm its URLs are canonical and return successfully, and submit the sitemap in Search Console. A sitemap helps discovery; it does not force a crawl or an index entry.