Content Decay

Content decay is the gradual loss of rankings and traffic from pages that once performed well, without anything on the page having changed. It happens because the web around the page keeps moving: competitors publish better pages for the same search, the words shoppers use shift, the questions they ask evolve, and — increasingly — an AI answer appears above the results and takes the click that used to arrive. A product page that ranked #4 two years ago drifts to #9, then to page 2, while its owner sees only a slow decline in orders and blames the economy.

For a catalogue of hundreds of products, decay is the default state, because every page is aging while the store owner is busy elsewhere. The encouraging part is that decayed pages are the fastest traffic to recover. Google already knows them, already associates them with the searches, and already has a history of them performing; they don't need to be discovered, only to be made better again. That's why a declining Search Traffic trend usually points to decay first, and why refreshing the pages that have lost the most clicks year over year is the highest-return work in most stores. The Studio 1119 essay on content decay treats the subject in full.