What is Provenance?
Verified 5 August 2026
Two timestamps matter and they are frequently confused. Fetch time is when the crawler retrieved the page; publication time is when the content says it was published. A page crawled yesterday may date from 2019.
For auditable work, provenance is what lets you reconstruct the evidence base as it stood at a point in time — and separating the two clocks is what makes that possible.
How unlob handles this: source filter
Common questions
What is Provenance?
Provenance records where a document came from and how it entered the index — which crawl, when fetched, and when published.
How does Provenance work in practice?
For auditable work, provenance is what lets you reconstruct the evidence base as it stood at a point in time — and separating the two clocks is what makes that possible.
See it working
The free tier is 10,000 requests a month with no card — enough to test any of this against your own queries.