Find the pages that are quietly losing clicks

What is content decay?

A page that used to bring in steady search traffic slowly brings in less. A competitor published something better, the topic moved on, or Google started answering the query itself. Nothing breaks, so nobody notices until the traffic has gone.

Not every drop is decay. A seasonal query, a lost ranking for one keyword, or another of your pages taking over the traffic all look the same in a total. The point is to spot the drop early, then work out which one it is.

How does Copilot SEO detect it?

It compares each page's recent clicks with the weeks before, using only days Google has finished reporting. The comparison needs 56 days of history, so content decay is on the Growth plan and above.

The list is ranked by the number of clicks lost, not the percentage. A page that went from 2,000 clicks to 1,600 comes above one that went from 30 to 10, because that is where the traffic went.

Sudden falls don't have to wait for that comparison. Alerts check every page each morning and flag a sharp drop in clicks as soon as the data shows it.

What you see in the app

On the Reports page, the Decay tab lists each declining page with its clicks before, clicks after and the change. Open a page in Copilot SEO to see its queries and position over time.

The Action plan turns each declining page into a "Diagnose the decline" item.

How do you fix a decaying page?

Diagnose before you edit. The Action plan's advice is to work out whether the loss came from rankings, click-through rate, demand or a competing URL, then make the smallest relevant update.

• Position dropped: the page lost ground. Compare it with what now ranks above it and update what's out of date.
• Position held but clicks fell: it's a snippet problem. Treat it as a CTR opportunity.
• Impressions fell with position steady: demand dropped. Rewriting the page won't bring searches back.
• Another of your URLs picked up the queries: check for keyword cannibalisation.

Once you've made a change, mark the Action plan item implemented and it's reviewed again 28 days later. For a fuller before and after, run it as an SEO experiment.