Published, Updated, Checked: What Our Review Dates Mean

The three dates

Published: The day the piece first went live. It never moves.
Updated: The last day something the page says changed: a score, a verdict, a price the page computes from, a specification, a correction, or rewritten text. It appears only when it is later than Published.
Checked: The last day the page passed the site's re-verification gate with nothing to fix. It appears only when it is later than both dates before it, because a check older than the last update says nothing the update did not.

The dates are printed as full dates in that order on every review, and the same three words are the only ones the site uses for them. There is no "reviewed", "re-checked" or "last modified" variant meaning something slightly different.

What a check covers

A check is the mechanical half of re-reading a page: every fact the page states that another source in the site can settle is derived again and compared. Nothing is graded against itself. On a review or a guide, that means:

every photograph the page shows exists, at the dimensions the page declares for it;
a price or a score the page attributes to another product still matches that product's own review;
the price the page quotes for its own subject still agrees with the price it records;
weight and impedance figures in the text still agree with the page's specification table;
on a guide, no product is named that the guide's own filters now exclude, and no pick is quoted with a score or price that has since moved;
any reference to the site's reference chain still names the units and scores the chain actually holds.

A page that fails any of these does not get the stamp, and a page that passes and later drifts has its stamp withdrawn on the next run. Where a page states two prices and which one is right is an editorial call rather than a fact the site can settle, the stamp is withheld until the editor decides: a page cannot re-read as accurate while it contradicts itself.

What a check does not do

It does not re-listen, re-score or reassess the verdict. The opinion on a review is the one formed over its listening period and stands as written on its Published date, or on its Updated date when the verdict itself was revised. A Checked stamp says the page's facts still hold together; it does not say the product was heard again.

It does not look up a live retail price. That needs a maker or a retailer, not the site's own records, so it has its own stamp, described below. It does not re-measure a specification either: it confirms the figures the page states agree with each other.

What moves the Updated date

A change to what the page tells a reader. A score or verdict that moves, a correction (listed in the review's own Corrections box with the date it shipped), a price the page computes its value rating and comparisons from, a corrected specification, or sections rewritten. A new benchmark arriving in a category can move an older score, and when it does, that is an update too.

What does not move it: a typo, a layout or design change, a re-encoded image, a new link, or a check that found nothing wrong. Bumping the date for those would make every page look fresh and the date would stop meaning anything, which is the reason the Checked stamp exists as a separate word.

How prices are dated

The price on a review is kept as the product's current price in the currency its maker sells in. A non-dollar price is shown as written with an approximate dollar figure beside it, from a fixed rate rather than a live one, so the approximation is marked as one. Where a price is a range, a starting figure or "varies", it is printed exactly that way and never turned into a single number.

When someone has verified the figure against a maker or a retailer, the At-a-glance card adds "price checked" with the date. That stamp is deliberately narrower than Checked: a Checked review with no price date has had its facts re-verified, not its price re-looked-up. The structured data on a review carries no offer or price at all, so no search result can present a figure from this site as a current price.

Some reviews also show a price history: what retailers charged for a new unit, read once a day from each store's own product page and published with the site's daily rebuild. Every figure carries the day it was seen. A store's page joins the history only once it is proven to be the reviewed product, new, and never a bundle, an open-box or a used unit: by the barcode another store already shows for it, by a part number that names it, or by a title where the brand, the product's own name and nothing unexplained appear, with a price in line with the review's. A page that cannot be proven is left out, and the check runs again on every reading, so a store that changes the page is caught the day it does. Prices from different countries are never mixed or converted into each other, and stores that ship from China are listed apart from US stores, because import duty can come on top of their price. US prices are before sales tax, UK and European ones include VAT, and none includes shipping. An average or a "lowest since" figure appears only once the tracking covers its period: a 90-day average needs 90 days of tracking with at least three quarters of them recorded. These links are not affiliate links and no retailer pays to be listed.

The reader identifies itself to stores as TheAudioStuffPrices, with a link to this section, and it reads robots.txt before anything else: it fetches only pages a store allows, at most one every 30 seconds, and it never works around a block or a CAPTCHA. It does not read stores whose own terms forbid automated monitoring. A store that does not want to be read can disallow TheAudioStuffPrices in its robots.txt, which takes effect on the next reading, or ask through the contact page.

Guides, comparisons and the glossary

A buying guide's Updated date is derived from its picks: when a ranked product's review changes, the guide's ranking is rebuilt and its date moves with it. Guides are checked by the same gate as reviews and carry Checked on the same rule.

A comparison is built from its two reviews, so its Published date is the later of theirs and its Updated date is the later of their updates, or the day the comparison's own text was last rewritten. It carries no Checked stamp of its own; each side's review carries one, and the comparison says when each was last checked.

A glossary explainer shows Published and, when revised, Updated. It is not put through the re-verification gate, so it never claims Checked.

Where machines read them

Search engines and other software read the same three dates from data built into each page, and the two never disagree. Published is the page's datePublished; Updated is dateModified, which is also the date in the site map we give search engines (Sitemaps XML format) and the date sent to the ones that accept update notices; Checked is lastReviewed, the field for "reviewed for accuracy", and never dateModified. The same dates ship per review in /ratings.json and /ratings.csv.

The record today

Figures as of Oct 3, 2026, the date of the newest stamp they count:

70 of 70 reviews carry a Checked stamp, the most recent from Oct 3, 2026;
70 of 70 reviews have been updated since they were published;
23 reviews carry a dated correction;
12 of 12 buying guides carry a Checked stamp;
5 of 70 reviews carry a verified price date.

Those numbers are counted from the catalogue on every build, so they cannot drift from the pages they describe. The testing side of the method - the room, the chain in every category and the protocol - is on how we test, the rubric and the verdict bands are on the methodology page, and errors can be reported here.