One date cannot speak for seven rivals
Our comparison pages once shared one read date. Re-reading one rival found two wrong cells; re-dating all seven would have claimed reads that never happened.
Our comparison hub sets us beside seven other systems, with a page per rival and a table of twenty feature cells each. For its first month every one of those pages carried the same sentence: read off their own public pages on 17 August. One constant, printed eight times.
That is a claim like any other cell in the table, and it stopped being true the first time one rival was re-read. In September we went back to one company’s own pages and two of their cells were wrong. Their platform page describes kitchen display screens with real-time routing, with a page of its own and one per venue type, where our table said their site does not say. And their sitemap had no loyalty page at all, the nearest thing being vouchers and passes, where our table had given them a full tick. One correction in each direction, which is what an honest re-read tends to produce.
The tempting fix, and why it was wrong
The obvious move was to fix the two cells and change the one date to the day of the re-read. That would have told readers of the other six pages that their rival had been re-read in September too. It had not. Re-dating the whole table would have claimed six reads that never happened, which is the same failure as the stale date, wearing the opposite sign.
So the date is per rival now. Each comparison page prints its own, the hub lists all seven, and the hub quotes the oldest and the newest so a reader can see the spread. A test fails if the seven dates collapse back to one, if a page shows a date that is not its column’s, or if the hub quotes a range the dates do not support.
What that rule cost us on Thursday
Thursday’s re-read of the rivals’ sitemaps corrected a count in one blog post, and the same rival’s table column was left exactly as it was, date included. The read covered a sitemap and six pages. It did not cover twenty cells about ordering, payments, operations and support, and moving the date would have said it did.
A date on a comparison is a promise about what was looked at and when. Seven rivals need seven promises, and each one is kept or broken on its own.