Last Updated Is a Useless Date
It tells the reader somebody fixed a typo. Last reviewed tells them the page is still true.
Almost every documentation site stamps pages with a last-updated date pulled from version control. It is the wrong signal, and readers have learned to ignore it.
What It Actually Measures
A commit. Fixing a broken link, correcting a spelling, reformatting a code block — all of these refresh the date without anyone checking whether the content is still correct. A page can say “updated last week” and describe an endpoint that changed a year ago.
What We Stamp Instead
Last reviewed: the date a named maintainer read the page against the current version and confirmed it. It moves less often and it means something. Typo fixes do not touch it.
The Automation Around It
Anything unreviewed for twelve months is flagged automatically and stays on an internal dashboard until someone confirms or rewrites it. Without the automation this degenerates into a date nobody maintains, which is where we started.
The Uncomfortable Side Effect
Publishing review dates makes stale pages visible to your users, not just to you. That is the point, and it is also why most teams do not do it. Being visibly six months behind on one page is better than being invisibly two years behind on forty.
