How to fix non iso date on BigCommerce

Steps for BigCommerce

1. Go to Storefront → My Themes → click 'Edit Theme Files' (Advanced) on your active theme.
2. Open the Stencil template file where schema is output — commonly templates/pages/blog-post.html or templates/components/schema.html.
3. Locate the date field. Stencil exposes a published_date object; use its iso8601 property: {{ blog.published_date.iso8601 }} which outputs a valid ISO-8601 string.
4. If that property is unavailable in your theme version, use the datetime attribute pattern: {{ blog.published_date.datetime }}.
5. For dateModified, use the same approach with the updated date helper if available, or set it equal to datePublished as a minimum.
6. Save, push the theme, and validate with Google's Rich Results Test.

What is non iso date?

Structured data on your pages (the hidden JSON-LD code that tells Google and other search engines what your content is about) includes date fields such as `datePublished` and `dateModified`. ISO-8601 is the internationally standardised date format — for example, `2025-03-12` or `2025-03-12T09:00:00+00:00`. When a date is written in plain English instead — like "Wed Mar 12 2025" — machines can't reliably read it, because there's no single agreed way to parse natural-language dates. Your current schema contains at least one date in a non-standard format, which means search engines may misread or completely ignore it.

Content freshness is a real ranking signal. Google uses `datePublished` and `dateModified` to understand when your pages and articles were created or last updated, and it surfaces that information directly in search results (e.g., "3 days ago" next to a result). If the date can't be parsed, Google may either ignore freshness entirely — hurting rankings for time-sensitive queries — or infer an incorrect date, making a new page look old. For AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), where AI-powered tools like Google's AI Overviews and Bing Copilot prioritise the freshest, most reliable sources, an unreadable date can mean your content is skipped over in favour of competitors whose schema is clean. Fixing this is a quick win with direct impact on how your pages are indexed and presented.

See the complete Non iso date guide for every platform and the full background.