What decay looks like in Search Console
Site-level traffic charts hide decay, because new pages mask old ones dying. A blog can be up 15% year on year while half its library is in free-fall. You have to look per URL.
Open the Performance report, switch to the Pages tab, and use the date comparison — last 6 months versus the same 6 months a year ago. Sort by the click difference, ascending. The top of that list is your decay report, and it will be longer than you expect.
Then do the harder version: for each losing URL, find its best-ever month. A page that pulled 900 clicks in a month and now pulls 300 is down 67% against itself, even if last year's comparison only shows a 20% dip because it was already sliding. Peak-relative is the honest measure.
Why pages decay
There are four common causes and they call for genuinely different responses. Diagnosing before acting is the whole game here; most people skip straight to "add 500 words", which fixes exactly one of the four.
- The facts went stale. Prices, tool names, version numbers, tax rules, screenshots. Common on anything with a number in the title. Readers bounce, and competitors with current figures win.
- Somebody wrote a better page. The most frequent cause and the least discussed. Your page didn't get worse; the bar moved. Check what now ranks above you and be honest about whether it's better.
- Intent shifted. Google re-read the query and now favours a different format — a comparison, a tool, a video. Your excellent guide is answering a question nobody's asking any more. See search intent.
- The SERP grew a new feature. An AI Overview, an expanded local pack, a shopping row. Your position is unchanged and your clicks are down, which is the tell: flat average position, falling click-through rate.
Refresh, merge or delete
Once a URL is on the list, it gets exactly one of three verdicts. Leaving it in "we'll look at it later" is how sites accumulate 400 pages nobody maintains and Google stops trusting.
| What you're seeing | What it means | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Still ranks 5–15, clicks down, topic still commercially relevant | The page has equity and a fixable quality gap | Refresh. Highest return in the whole exercise. |
| Two or three of your URLs compete for the same query | Keyword cannibalisation, splitting signals three ways | Merge into the strongest URL and 301 the rest. |
| No impressions for 12 months, no links, no commercial purpose | Nobody wants it and it dilutes the site's topical focus | Delete and 410, or 301 if a genuine successor exists. |
| Position flat, CTR down, an AI Overview now sits above | You lost clicks, not rankings | Rework the title and opening, not the whole page. |
What a real refresh involves
A refresh is not a date change. Republishing a 2022 post with a 2026 timestamp is the single most common non-fix in this business, and it does nothing except make your dateModified a lie.
A refresh means the page is materially better than it was. In practice that's most of this list on any page worth saving:
- Read the top three results that beat you, and write down what each covers that you don't.
- Update every number, price, tool name and screenshot. Delete claims you can no longer support.
- Fix the intent match. If the SERP now wants a comparison table, add the comparison table.
- Rewrite the first 150 words. That's what the snippet and the AI citation pull from, and it's usually the oldest prose on the page.
- Re-do the internal links, both directions — new pages published since should point at this one.
- Only then update the date, and only if the change is genuine.