Most guides on content decay were written before AI changed how search results work, and it shows. The old advice was simple: if a page loses traffic, refresh it. A page can now look like it’s decaying when it’s performing perfectly well – AI overviews or LLMs (like ChatGPT) summarise the information for users, removing the need for them to click through to your website.
Content decay will often cost you valuable organic traffic, and you may not even realise it’s happening. To help you understand why, and how you can fix it, we’ve put together this content decay guide. The data you need to spot it won’t show up in your standard analytics reports, and it affects service pages just as much as blog posts.
In addition to finding which pages are losing ground, you need to understand if there’s a worthwhile action to recover them. Fixing one high-traffic page that’s dropped can deliver more organic traffic and leads than publishing something new.
At Elliptycs we’re an SEO agency. Last quarter we ran a content decay review across 1428 pages, and in this guide we’ll show you exactly how our process works, including how we use Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report and Google Search Console’s Generative AI report to see how a page is actually being used by AI.
What is Content Decay?
Content decay is the gradual decrease in a piece of content’s organic traffic and search rankings.
Content decay is problematic because it affects pages individually rather than your whole website at once. If your website’s organic traffic is growing, then page-level decay could be hiding underneath positive site numbers, and you could be losing out on even more growth.
Why Does Content Decay Happen?
There are several primary causes of content decay, that often work simultaneously:
- Competitors improve their content: Search results are dynamic and constantly changing. If a competitor publishes something more thorough, better structured, or more up to date than your content, search engines will take notice and reward your competitors.
- Your content becomes outdated: If a page on your website becomes outdated, users will leave the page quickly when they realise that the information isn’t up to date. This will send signals to search engines and LLMs that your content isn’t helpful, and it will subsequently lose rankings on results pages and won’t be cited in LLM chats (like ChatGPT). An article for our accountancy client was starting to lose traffic as it was becoming outdated. This was flagged in a content decay review, and we updated the page in January 2026. As you can see in Google Search Console, updating the page meant that users started to find it useful again, and traffic increased as a result.
- Search intent evolves: The way people search for a topic changes over time, and search engines are continuously refining their understanding of a query’s meaning. A good example is the acronym ‘LLM’ – search for it now and the results are dominated by large language models. Seven years ago you would have found postgraduate law qualifications.
- Cannibalisation: If you have two pages on your website that cover the same topic and contain similar information, search engines may not be able to discern which one to prioritise to rank for the relevant search terms, harming both of their rankings. This happened with one of our clients where we had a service page for ‘contract lifting’. To complement the service page, we subsequently published an article on ‘What is a contract lift and when is it needed?’ This blog article instantly started to disrupt the ranking of the contract lifting service page, as shown in the image below. To fix this, we ensured that all content related to the contract lift service was consolidated onto the service page, and used service-related anchor text on the blog article to point at the service page.
The Rise of AI SERP Features and LLMs
AI SERP features have significantly changed how we look at content decay for our clients. One of these AI SERP features is AI overviews, which summarises information from multiple sources and can answer complex questions on the results page itself. As you can see from one of our client’s articles below, the clicks have disproportionately decreased compared with impressions, and the Generative AI features report confirms that this article is appearing AI overviews.
LLMs (like ChatGPT) have also changed how people search. Users can input complex search queries and get a direct response from an LLM without having to click onto your page. You can see below that there are pages for our automotive client where traffic is coming from ChatGPT directly. Although these LLMs are capable of directly answering complex search queries, similarly to AI overviews, they cite the sources of their information, so it is worthwhile creating good content to appear as a citation for brand visibility and building trust with your audience.
Algorithm Updates
Algorithm updates can also impact traffic coming to your website. They are not attributed to content decay as closely as other factors because they usually cause sudden, sitewide shifts in rankings, whereas content decay affects individual pages with a gradual decline.
Why Addressing Content Decay is Important?
Content decay negatively impacts your page’s search rankings, which affects visibility and incoming organic traffic. Not long ago, the top organic Google result received 21.92% of clicks on a results page (UK-based, May 2026). This is now changing as AI SERP features and LLMs absorb more clicks.
Top-of-funnel blog content is often the first point of contact a potential client has with your business, as these are usually informational queries and the searcher may not know exactly what they are looking for. If a guide is ranking well, a reader finds it, stays on the page, and has a reason to explore your site further – that journey could lead to an enquiry.
A key part of our SEO service at Elliptycs is investing the time to refresh and maintain existing content, so the value of what a client has already published is maximised rather than always chasing new pages.
When to Check for Content Decay
A content decay review is not something you want to be doing as a one-off exercise.
At Elliptycs, we run checks every quarter to catch decay issues early, and because we work with clients in fast paced industries (such as finance), where articles can quickly become outdated. This also allows us to schedule in content decay reviews to our workflow, instead of just doing them ad hoc.
Prioritising Which Content to Review
It is not commercially viable to review every piece of content in detail. For our clients, we prioritise pages that have the biggest aggregate drop, not based on percentages of the loss. A page that has dropped from 1,200 to 600 visits is a 50% drop, and far more urgent than a page that has an 80% decrease from 5 visits to 1.
We don’t just look at which pages lost the most traffic, we look at which pages drive enquiries. A page that brings in leads is a higher priority to recover than one with more traffic that never converts, because the commercial cost of it decaying is what ultimately drives return on investment for our clients.
Using this approach, we can prioritise high-traffic blog content and service pages that are generating leads, so that our content decay review and the necessary following actions focusses on the most commercially valuable pages for our clients.
Spotting Signs of Content Decay in the Era of AI Overviews and LLMs
You can’t diagnose content decay from traffic alone, especially in the era of AI overviews and LLMs. We analyse four sources together:
- Traffic (from Google Analytics / GA4)
- Search visibility (from Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools)
- AI visibility (Generative AI data in the same tools)
- Target Keyword Rankings (from Ahrefs Rank Tracker)
It’s often where these sources disagree; traffic falling while AI impressions climb, that tells us what’s really going on.
Traffic – Google Analytics
We use Google Analytics to analyse traffic across our clients’ websites. We can filter to view individual pages so we can see exactly how content is performing over time.
One of the limitations of Google Analytics is that out of the box you can only compare one date range against another, which is why we built our own internal tool that quickly pulls a page’s organic traffic across a 12 month period. This gives us greater context of how a page is performing over a longer time frame, instead of just looking at snapshot comparisons.
We use this alongside month-on-month and year-on-year comparisons to account for seasonality. Seasonality may mistakenly show that a page is decaying when this isn’t the case. Take a look at the organic traffic for our accountancy client’s article. Month-on-month organic traffic is increasing, but year-on-year it is down. Tax as a topic is very seasonal, and fluctuations influence traffic data. By comparing the same period year-on-year we get a much more accurate picture of whether we are dealing with genuine decline or an expected dip caused by seasonality.
SERP Visibility – Google Search Console
We use Google Search Console to analyse a page’s visibility on a results page. We can see how many impressions and clicks a page gets, as well as the click through rate and the average position [on a results page].
- Impressions stable + Clicks down: This highlights a click-through problem. It could be that you need to update your title and meta description to be more engaging. It could now also be that your content is being summarised in an AI overview, eating the click but still using your content.
- Impressions down + Position stable: This highlights a decrease in search demand for the page’s topic.
- Impressions down + Position down: This highlights genuine ranking loss, as the page’s falling impressions are explained by the drop in rankings, not by a shift in topical relevance.
The average position metric can be misleading, if you stop ranking for certain search queries, then it may seem that your average position is increasing when in reality you are just ranking for less queries. We read each position per query, focussing on the top queries, so that we can see how the page is performing for the search queries that matter.
AI Visibility and AI Reports
AI SERP features in Google have significantly changed how we analyse data in a content decay review.
We now use Google Search Console’s AI Generative report, and Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance Report to look at how AI overviews are summarising our clients’ pages. We cross-reference data alongside Google Analytics traffic reports and Google Search Console’s standard reports to see if a decline is being caused by AI overviews, or if there is a genuine decline.
Below is the impressions and clicks data for an article from our automotive client’s website. The impressions are holding stable, but the clicks are down, at first glance this suggests that the article is starting to decay. When we pull up Google Search Console’s Generative AI report, we can see that this article has 21,700 impressions in AI SERP features over the last 2 months. Although this is absorbing the article’s clicks, the article is still serving a purpose by boosting brand visibility and building trust with the target audience through AI SERP features and LLM tools.
Rank Tracking
We use a keyword rank tracker to monitor which keywords our clients’ pages are ranking for and how those positions are changing over time.
If a page has lost rankings for important keywords over the last few months, that is a strong signal that action may be required.
It is also worth distinguishing between a page losing ground on its core terms, and keywords that are declining in search volume naturally. For our health and safety client, an example of this was when the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA) became the Institute of Sustainability and Environmental Professionals (ISEP). Search volume for IEMA started to naturally decline in 2025 to reflect this replacement. If you had written an article on IEMA in 2024, you would be able to see that a decline in traffic isn’t caused by a drop in rankings, but IEMA-related keywords losing search traffic as people stop searching for those terms. Conversely if your core terms have consistent monthly search volume, and your ranking for these terms is dropping then that should be addressed.
We always check the search volume behind a keyword before investing time in actioning content decay; a fading page on a topic people are still actively searching for may be worth acting on, whereas genuinely declining search volume for a topic may mean the page is no longer worth investing time in.
The Page Itself
It is also worth looking at the page directly. Does the content still read well? Is the information accurate and up to date? For clients in sectors where details change regularly such as finance, even a well-structured page can start sending the wrong signals if it contains dated information.
Deciding What to Do with Content That is Decaying
By cross checking data, we use factors such as traffic, search page visibility, topical relevance and generative AI numbers to decide the best course of action for a piece of content. Based on these factors, we assign pages that have been flagged in our content decay review one of the following actions:
- Keep/monitor: Our content decay review sometimes flags pages that we don’t subsequently action. This could be because a page is starting to be summarised in AI overviews. Although its losing the clicks (which is why it’s been flagged), the page is appearing in AI SERP features and LLM chats which is important for branding visibility and building trust with your audience.
- Review: A review is the best course of action when a page has a mild decline in traffic. When there is a small decrease in clicks, impressions are stable, and there’s no significant appearance in AI SERP features, we’ll refresh the page’s meta description/title and ensure that all information is up to date to start re-earning those lost clicks.
- Refresh/expand: The difference between a mild decline and something more substantial, is that we’d start to see the average position and impressions falling with clicks. There would also not be an uplift in appearance in AI SERP features. When this is the case, we update existing content, add more content to the page, refresh references and strengthen internal links.
- Rewrite: When a page targets a valuable keyword, but is structurally weak, badly dated and poorly formatted, with a significant decline in traffic, we give it a serious rework, or produce a new and reformatted version of the page.
- Consolidate: As shown previously with the two contract lifting pages for our heavy lifting solutions client, when two pages are competing for the same topic and intent, we consolidate or merge the content to one page. In most instances we’d redirect other competing pages to that consolidated page.
- 301 redirect: When a low-level page is flagged in our content decay review, with no real opportunity or strategic value in salvaging it, we redirect it to a relevant parent page, or category page to preserve equity that the page may still be generating.
- Remove: When a low-level page is flagged that has no value and no sensible redirect target, we remove the page entirely. We utilise this rarely and always look to find a page’s value before removing it.
If you’re looking to review, refresh/expand or rewrite a page you should also check what format the top-ranking pages for that topic are taking. If the search results are dominated by listicles where you have a long-form guide, or vice versa, that tells you something about what type of content search engines are rewarding.
One thing that is easy to overlook is that content decay action points can get pushed down the priority list in favour of producing new content. New content feels productive; fixing old content feels like maintenance. But if your highest-traffic pages are quietly losing ground, addressing them could be a big return on investment for organic traffic.
We have rebuilt our content calendar to keep a record of every content decay review we run. Each piece of our client’s live content has a log, with dated notes on what was found in the content decay review and what action was taken, meaning each subsequent content decay review builds on the last rather than repeating it.
Conclusion
We recently carried out a content decay review across 628 pages for an automotive client, each assessed against 12 months of Google Analytics data. The review classified every page in scope as declining, growing, or stable, and surfaced non-obvious opportunities that a manual audit would likely have missed. This included pages that were losing clicks despite improving rankings, pointing to AI Overview displacement rather than a content problem. Layering AI citation data alongside other data streams in our content decay review process allows us to identify which pages are losing clicks to AI-generated answers and which are genuinely decaying, so that we can prioritise action accordingly.
Content decay is something we work on regularly with our clients. If you would like to find out how our SEO services can help protect and grow your organic traffic, get in touch.
