Content Decay

The Content Decay heatmap: your top pages month by month against their own best month, with the rules behind decaying, growing and stable.

Content Decay is a heatmap of your top pages, one row per page and one column per calendar month. Each cell compares the month with that page's own best month, so a page that fades slowly stands out even when the site total grows.

Open Content and switch to the Content Decay tab. Use it to pick pages for a content update before they drop out.

Range and pages included

• The range buttons 3M, 6M, 12M and 16M set how many months are shown. The default is 12 months, and your last choice is remembered in the browser.
• The heatmap lists the pages with the most clicks over the selected range: the top 100 on the Free plan, the top 500 on paid plans.
• Everything is computed inside the selected range. A page's peak is its best month in that range, so the same page can read differently at 6 and at 16 months.

How a cell is computed

A cell is the month's clicks per day (clicks divided by the days of that month in the range) as a share of the page's peak month. Comparing per day keeps 28-day and 31-day months, and a partial current month, on the same footing.

• A month marked * is partial. A month with fewer than 7 days in the range cannot be the peak.
• A cell showing ? is unknown: the page fell outside the rows read for that month (up to 25,000 pages per month on paid plans, 5,000 on Free).
• Hover or tap a cell for the month's clicks, impressions and position.

Status rules

Status compares the last 3 months, as clicks per day, with the peak month and with the 3 months before them. The rules are applied in this order:

• The column Now vs peak shows the first comparison as a percentage.
• Clicks lost / month is the peak level minus the recent level, per day, times 30.
• With the 3-month range there are no earlier months to compare with, so no page is labelled Growing.

Filters and sorting

• The cards Decaying, Growing and Stable show the counts. Click one to list only those pages.
• The search box filters URLs by plain text or regex.
• The filter bar has the columns URL, Status, Now vs peak, Now vs prior 3 months, Clicks and Clicks lost / month.
• Sort offers Most clicks lost (the default), Biggest decay (%), Most clicks and URL. Sorting by clicks lost keeps small pages that went from 40 clicks to 0 from crowding the top.
• The table shows 100 pages at a time; a button under it shows the next 100.

Acting on a page

1. Click a row to open the page detail on 16 months, with the queries that land on the page.
2. Update the page.
3. Back in the heatmap, click Log action on the row. The action opens as a content update with the page filled in, and its before/after result is measured for you.

In Content findings, a keyword whose page is decaying carries a Decaying badge that links back here.

Export and data source

• Export offers two datasets, each as CSV, Excel or Copy for Sheets: Pages by month (one row per page with a clicks and impressions column for every month) and Page × month (one row each) for pivot tables, with CTR, position and the share of the peak.
• Finished months do not change and are kept. The current and the previous month are refreshed after each daily sync. Reload from Search Console under the table fetches the open months again.
• On a paid plan with a working BigQuery connection, the month lists are read from the bulk export instead of the API, and the header reads “Search Console (BigQuery export)”.