How to fix non iso date on Shopify

Steps for Shopify

1. In your Shopify admin, go to Online Store → Themes → click 'Edit code' on your active theme.
2. Search for 'datePublished' using the search bar in the code editor — it is typically found in theme.liquid, article.liquid, page.liquid, or a snippets/ file such as snippets/structured-data.liquid.
3. Locate the Liquid output tag that renders the date, e.g. {{ article.published_at }} or a hardcoded string.
4. Replace it with the Liquid date filter to enforce ISO-8601: {{ article.published_at | date: '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00' }}
5. Do the same for dateModified, using {{ article.updated_at | date: '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00' }}
6. Save the file, then test a live article URL in Google's Rich Results Test to confirm the dates parse correctly.

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.