Find the pages quietly losing organic traffic, before the rankings go

Search Console will show you this if you ask it page by page, with the right two windows, for every page on the site. That is the part nobody does by hand. `find_content_decay` does the comparison across your pages and returns the ones that are actually sliding.

This guide runs the scan, separates real decay from seasonality and SERP changes, and ends with a short ranked list of pages to refresh. If you have been connected long enough to have history past Google's 16-month window, the same scan can run over years instead of months, which is where seasonality finally becomes visible.

What is content decay?

Content decay is a page losing organic traffic gradually, over months, without anything obviously breaking. No penalty, no deindexing, no traffic cliff on a Tuesday. The page simply drifts from position 4 to 6 to 9 while newer pages, fresher data and more direct answers take its place, and the clicks fall a little every month.

It is easy to miss precisely because it is slow. A dashboard showing the last 28 days against the prior 28 reports a 6% dip, which looks like noise. The same page across twelve months has lost half its traffic. By the time it shows up as a problem at site level, the recovery is a rewrite rather than a refresh.

How do I tell decay from seasonality or a Google update?

Three checks separate them. Compare the page with the same period last year, not just the prior month, because seasonal queries fall every year on schedule and recover on schedule. Check whether the drop is site-wide or page-specific: an algorithm update usually moves many pages at once, while decay picks off individual pages. And look at impressions next to clicks, because a page losing impressions is losing ranking, while a page holding impressions and losing clicks is losing the click to something else on the result page.

That last distinction decides what you do next. Falling impressions means the page is being outranked and the content needs work. Steady impressions with falling CTR usually means the result page changed around you, not that your page got worse.

• ·Clicks down, impressions down, position down: you are being outranked. Refresh the content.
• ·Clicks down, impressions flat, position flat: the result page changed. Check the SERP features.
• ·Clicks down and up again every year at the same time: seasonality, not decay.
• ·Everything down on the same date across many pages: look at what changed on the site or in the index that week.

Which decaying pages are worth refreshing first?

Not the biggest drop. The biggest recoverable drop. A page that fell from 40 clicks to 10 on a query nobody searches any more is not coming back no matter what you write. A page that fell from 400 to 250 while its query volume held steady is worth an afternoon.

Rank the candidates by what you would gain, not by what you lost: current impressions still arriving, how far the position slipped, and whether the page converts. A decaying page that still converts at 3% deserves attention before a higher-traffic page that converts at nothing.