This article explains why you'll sometimes see incorrect information in the Changed on and Changed by fields displayed in the comparison results table or in your org change monitoring results.

There are two main reasons for incorrect Changed on information:

Changed on dates for metadata in Salesforce are updated when users make manual changes to an item. They are not updated by automated processes such as sandbox refreshes or platform releases (both discussed in further detail below).

In some cases, you might notice the Changed on date showing the time of the comparison, and Changed by displaying the username of the user running it. This is not a Gearset issue, but a limitation of Salesforce’s Metadata API.
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This bug commonly affects metadata types like workflow rules and custom objects. Salesforce may return the current time and user instead of the true last modified data. For example, querying a workflow via Workbench may show the current timestamp as both lastModifiedDate and createdDate, even if the item hasn’t recently changed.

The most common case of misleading Changed on date is after a sandbox refresh. When you refresh a sandbox from another org (e.g. from production), metadata is copied across, but Salesforce does not update the Changed on date.

Example:

The other main cause of erroneous Changed on is Salesforce platform releases (e.g. Summer '18 > Winter '19). If a platform release introduces new features or modifies metadata, this will not affect their Changed on information.

For example, the org below has been updated from Summer '18 (v43) to Winter '19 (v44) of the Metadata API. As a result, several objects have been changed, but their Changed on dates are still showing the date those objects were manually edited by users in the org.

There is a bug in the Salesforce Metadata API that means sometimes Salesforce returns incorrect Changed on information for an item. This bug can affect a range of different items, but is most commonly seen in the workflow and custom object metadata types.

In fact, if you have access to Workbench, you can try this yourself. 

Below is an example workflow being queried using Workbench. This retrieval was run on the 31st August 2018 at 9:39 am. You can see that Salesforce returns the current time for both lastModifiedDate and createdDate, and not the actual times you'll see if you log into the Salesforce UI.

Unfortunately, there is no workaround for this bug.

If you want to confirm the Changed on and Changed by for any item, you can log into the Salesforce org in question and check in the UI, although this will still be subject to the provisions mentioned above about what alters the date.

Understanding what causes the Changed on information to be updated explains why you may sometimes see unexpected results in an org change monitoring job in Gearset.

For example, If a monitored sandbox is refreshed from another environment, the next snapshot will show changes even though the Changed on values may still reflect the source org's original data. This can make it seem like changes happened earlier or later than they actually did.

While this can be confusing, it’s a result of how Salesforce handles metadata during org refreshes and API responses. Gearset continues to monitor and surface metadata changes as accurately as possible within these constraints.