# How is the value of the "published\_at" field determined?

**URL:** <https://community.swiftype.com/t/how-is-the-value-of-the-published-at-field-determined/104>\
**Category:** Setup & Indexing\
**Tags:** meta-tags\
**Created:** [December 22, 2015, 5:41pm UTC](https://community.swiftype.com/t/how-is-the-value-of-the-published-at-field-determined/104 "2015-12-22T17:41:12Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/uploads/swiftype/original/1X/fd652d1735c60057fa71c371375511028f9a1832.png) [@system](https://community.swiftype.com/u/system)\
**Post date:** [December 22, 2015, 5:41pm UTC](https://community.swiftype.com/t/how-is-the-value-of-the-published-at-field-determined/104/1 "2015-12-22T17:41:12Z")

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> **If I don’t add a “published\_at” meta tag for the crawler to detect, what value does the crawler set the field do?**

> **In my result details view I see some pages have a published\_at value, but I did not define a meta tag on the page to set that value.**

Unless the **`published_at`** value is defined via [meta tag](https://swiftype.com/documentation/meta_tags2#stpublished), the field value will default to the last date and time the page was analyzed and updated/indexed by our web crawler.