Content Decay

What it measures

• Page Type — the URL's classification from your page-type rules.
• URL — the page being measured.
• Clicks (Current) and Clicks (Prev) — total clicks in the selected window, and in the equal-length window immediately before it.
• Click Δ% — the percentage change between those two numbers. This is the column the report sorts on, steepest decline first.
• Impr. (Current), Impr. (Prev) and Impr. Δ% — the same comparison for impressions. A page can qualify on impressions alone, which usually means lost visibility rather than lost clicks.

How we compute it

1. We take your selected reporting window (30 days by default) and sum each URL's clicks and impressions within it — the current numbers.
2. We do the same for the previous window: the same number of days, ending the day before your window starts.
3. A URL is only considered if it had both clicks and impressions in the previous window — a page cannot decay from nothing.
4. A URL appears in the report when clicks < previous × 0.8 or impressions < previous × 0.8 — i.e. either measure fell by at least 20%.
5. Results are sorted ascending by click change, so the steepest declines float to the top.

Note that this is a period-over-period comparison, not a comparison against an all-time peak. Change the reporting window and both halves of the comparison move with it.

Scenarios you'll see

What to do with it

1. Open the URL and audit it: are facts, prices, dates, screenshots, code samples still current?
2. Compare your page to the current top-3 results for its primary query — what do they cover that you don't?
3. Update content, expand thin sections, add an FAQ block, refresh internal links pointing to the page from your high-authority hubs.
4. Update dateModified in your schema and request reindexing in Search Console.
5. Re-check the click change after 4–8 weeks; meaningful refreshes usually rebound 30–80% of the lost clicks.

Caveats & limits

• This compares two adjacent windows, so a one-off spike in the previous window makes the current one look like decay. Eyeball the trend before reacting.
• Seasonal pages will look decayed heading into their off-season — the comparison has no concept of seasonality. Verify against YoY Dashboard before refreshing.
• Brand-new pages that launched during the previous window can show a decline simply because that window caught their launch burst.
• A short reporting window makes the report noisier, because both halves are short. Widen the window if too many pages qualify on small absolute numbers.
• Qualifying on impressions only is not necessarily a content problem — it usually means the page is being shown less often, which points at rankings or SERP changes rather than the page itself.