Content decay statistics at a glance
| Category | Statistic | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Decay rate | A blog's organic traffic decayed at an average of 1.21% per week, compounding | Animalz, 2018 |
| Decay rate | At 1.21% per week a page holds half its traffic for 57 weeks, a 13-month half-life | Computed from Animalz 2018 |
| Traffic shape | 97% of a successful post's lifetime traffic arrived after the launch spike, 90% after six months live | Animalz, 2018 |
| Page age | 72.9% of pages in Google's top 10 are more than three years old, up from 59% in 2017 | Ahrefs, 2025 |
| Page age | The average #1 ranking page is five years old; in 2017 it was two | Ahrefs, 2025 |
| Refresh | Updating and republishing old posts lifted their monthly organic search views by an average of 106% | HubSpot, updated June 2025 |
| Refresh | One refresh produced over 30,000 extra pageviews and a 55% rise in weekly traffic | Animalz, 2018 |
| Old content | 76% of monthly blog views and 92% of monthly blog leads came from posts published in earlier months | HubSpot, 2025 |
| Cadence | Content ranking on page one was last updated 730 days ago on average, across 17,749 keywords | Siege Media, April 2025 |
| Zero traffic | 96.55% of pages in a 14-billion-page index get zero traffic from Google | Ahrefs, December 2023 |
| CTR decay | Position-one click-through rate on informational keywords with no AI Overview fell from 7.6% to 3.9% between December 2023 and December 2025 | Ahrefs, February 2026 |
| Link rot | 66.5% of links pointing to 2,062,173 sampled websites had rotted since January 2013 | Ahrefs, updated February 2024 |
| Disappearance | 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible in October 2023 | Pew Research Center, May 2024 |
| Disappearance | Half-life of a web page: about 14.5 years, from Pew's decade of page loss | Computed from Pew 2024 |
| Who refreshes | Bloggers who update old articles are twice as likely to report strong results | Orbit Media Studios, 2026 |
What is content decay, and how fast does traffic fall?
Content decay is the gradual loss of organic traffic and rankings by a page that once performed, and the best public measurement of its speed is Animalz's 2018 analysis of the AdEspresso blog, which found an average decline of 1.21% per week.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| The AdEspresso blog's decaying pages lost organic traffic at an average of 1.21% per week. The rate compounds, so the loss accelerates in absolute terms even when the percentage holds. | Animalz, 2018 |
| 97% of the lifetime traffic to one successful Appcues post arrived after the initial promotional spike, and 90% arrived after the post had already been live for six months. | Animalz, 2018 |
| A page holding a 1.21% weekly decline keeps half of its traffic for 57 weeks, roughly 13 months. | Computed from Animalz 2018 |
The 1.21% figure is eight years old and comes from one B2B software blog, so treat it as a shape rather than a benchmark. What makes it useful is that it is one of the very few decay rates anyone has published with the underlying data described, and the shape it draws matches what I see in Search Console on client sites: nothing dramatic happens in any single month, and then a year has passed and the page is at half. The compounding is the whole story, and it is the part people miss when they look at a month-over-month report and decide the dip is noise.
How old is the content that ranks on page one?
Pages in Google's top 10 are old and getting older: 72.9% of them are more than three years old and the average number-one result is five years old, according to Ahrefs' 2025 analysis of 1.3 million keywords.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 72.9% of pages in Google's top 10 are more than three years old, up from 59% when Ahrefs ran the same study in 2017. | Ahrefs, 2025 |
| The average #1 ranking page in Google is five years old. In 2017 it was two years old. | Ahrefs, 2025 |
| Only 13.7% of pages in the top 10 are less than a year old, down from 22% in 2017. | Ahrefs, 2025 |
| 1.74% of newly published pages reached Google's top 10 within a year, measured across a sample of one million URLs. | Ahrefs, 2025 |
| 40.82% of the pages that did reach the top 10 got there within a month of publication, so a page that has not moved after six months rarely moves later. | Ahrefs, 2025 |
| Google's November 2011 freshness update affected roughly 35% of all searches, and the query-deserves-freshness principle it formalised still governs which topics reward recency. | Search Engine Journal on Google's freshness update, November 2011 |
Read those two Ahrefs numbers together and the picture changes. Old pages dominate the top 10, and almost no new page gets in. That is not evidence that age is a ranking factor, it is evidence that incumbency compounds: the page that ranked in 2021 collected links, internal links and behavioural signals for five years while yours collected nothing. Which means the cheapest path to a top-10 ranking in 2026 usually runs through a page you already own, not a page you have yet to write.
How much traffic does updating an old post win back?
HubSpot's historical optimisation programme raised monthly organic search views on updated and republished posts by an average of 106% (HubSpot, updated June 2025). It is the only refresh benchmark I have found that names its metric and the size of the programme instead of quoting one lucky post.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| HubSpot increased monthly organic search views to posts it updated and republished by an average of 106%. | HubSpot, updated June 2025 |
| 76% of HubSpot's monthly blog views came from posts published in earlier months, and 92% of monthly blog leads did. | HubSpot, 2025 |
| A single content refresh on the AdEspresso blog produced more than 30,000 additional pageviews and a 55% increase in weekly traffic. | Animalz, 2018 |
| Orbit Media reports that about half of the articles it publishes are rewrites of older posts, and that one rewritten article's quarterly traffic rose 700% with engagement up 180%. | Orbit Media Studios, 2026 |
| A refresh that doubles organic views buys back about 59 weeks of decay at the 1.21% weekly rate. | Computed from HubSpot and Animalz |
Two of those numbers belong on the same slide. HubSpot's 106% is a programme-wide average across many updated posts; Orbit Media's 700% is one article. HubSpot has carried the 106% forward through repeated updates to the same evergreen post, so the experiment behind it is older than the June 2025 date on the page. Use the first to plan and the second to sell the idea internally, never the other way round. And notice what the 92% figure really says: at a mature blog almost every lead comes from work that was finished months ago, which makes the refresh queue a revenue line rather than a housekeeping chore. If you want the money side of that argument, the content marketing ROI statistics page has the spend and return benchmarks.
How often do the pages that rank get updated?
Content sitting on page one of Google was last updated 730 days ago on average, according to Siege Media's April 2025 analysis of 17,749 keywords carrying 283 million monthly searches, but the average hides a spread from 143 days to 1,420 days by query type.
| Query type | Average days since last update | Source |
|---|---|---|
| "best software" keywords | 143 | Siege Media, April 2025 |
| High difficulty keywords (KD 90+) | 320 | Siege Media, April 2025 |
| All page-one content | 730 | Siege Media, April 2025 |
| "what is" keywords | 750 | Siege Media, April 2025 |
| "how to" keywords | 864 | Siege Media, April 2025 |
| "calculator" keywords | 1,420 | Siege Media, April 2025 |
Two further numbers set the context for that cadence: how often marketers look at their back catalogue, and how much recency AI assistants demand.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 33% of marketers run a content audit twice a year, 24% once a year and 21% more than three times a year. | Semrush State of Content Marketing, 2023 |
| URLs cited by AI assistants are 25.7% "fresher" than the organic search results for the same queries. | Ahrefs, 2026 |
This table is the most actionable thing on the page, because it turns "refresh your content" into a date. A comparison page about software needs a visible update every four to five months to sit alongside its competitors. A calculator page can go four years untouched. Most refresh calendars I have reviewed apply one cadence to everything, which means the commercial pages rot while somebody diligently re-dates a glossary entry nobody reads.
How many pages get no traffic at all?
96.55% of the 14 billion pages in Ahrefs' Content Explorer index got zero traffic from Google in December 2023. That share is the floor decay eventually pulls pages toward.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 96.55% of all pages in Ahrefs' roughly 14-billion-page index get zero traffic from Google. | Ahrefs, December 2023 |
| 94% of the 912 million blog posts analysed with BuzzSumo have zero external links, and 2.2% earn links from more than one website. | Backlinko and BuzzSumo, February 2019 |
| Only 13.9% of content marketers say their blog delivers strong results, the lowest reading in the survey's history, from 1,042 respondents. | Orbit Media Studios, 2026 |
The zero-traffic number is quoted constantly and understood rarely. It counts pages, not publishers, and an index of 14 billion pages is mostly the exhaust of the web: tag archives, paginated listings, abandoned sites. A working blog will never see 96.55%. What the figure does tell you is the direction of gravity. Every page that stops being updated drifts toward that bucket, and most of them arrive.
How fast does the web itself disappear?
Pew Research Center found that 38% of the web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible in October 2023, from a sample of roughly one million pages drawn from Common Crawl archives.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 38% of pages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible in October 2023. 8% of pages captured in the 2023 snapshot were already gone. | Pew Research Center, May 2024 |
| 54% of English Wikipedia pages contain at least one dead reference link, and 11% of all reference links are inaccessible, from 50,000 pages and over a million links. | Pew Research Center, May 2024 |
| 23% of news pages and 21% of government pages carry at least one broken link, from 500,000 pages of each type. | Pew Research Center, May 2024 |
| 66.5% of the links pointing to 2,062,173 sampled websites had rotted since January 2013. Counting crawl errors and other blocks takes the loss to 74.5%. | Ahrefs, updated February 2024 |
| One in five science, technology and medicine articles suffers reference rot. In 2012 articles alone, 13% of arXiv, 17% of Elsevier and 19% of PubMed Central web references were already rotten, across 3.5 million articles. | Klein et al., PLOS ONE, December 2014 |
| More than 70% of URLs cited in three Harvard law journals and 50% of URLs in US Supreme Court opinions suffer reference rot. | Zittrain, Albert and Lessig, Harvard Law Review Forum, 2014 |
| The Internet Archive and volunteers repaired more than nine million broken Wikipedia links by pointing them at Wayback Machine snapshots, while archiving about 20 million URLs a week from Wikipedia. | Internet Archive, October 2018 |
Every number in this section is more than two years old, and I am keeping the set because nobody has rerun the work at this scale since. Link rot also explains a decay pattern people misdiagnose as a Google problem. If 66.5% of the links pointing at a site die within nine years, a page that has not earned a new link since 2019 is losing authority even when its content is perfect. The rot is happening to your backlink profile, not to your paragraphs.
Is decay now coming from AI search rather than from rankings?
Yes, partly: Ahrefs found that position-one click-through rate on informational keywords with no AI Overview present still fell from 7.6% to 3.9% between December 2023 and December 2025, so pages are losing clicks without losing rank.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Across 300,000 keywords, position-one CTR on informational keywords with no AI Overview fell from 7.6% in December 2023 to 3.9% in December 2025. | Ahrefs, February 2026 |
| Where an AI Overview appears, it now correlates with a 58% lower CTR for the top-ranking page, worse than the 34.5% Ahrefs measured in April 2025. | Ahrefs, February 2026 |
| 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in January to April 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024. | SparkToro and Similarweb, June 2026 |
| Organic traffic to news sites has dropped 26% since Google launched AI Overviews. Similarweb prints this as a report headline with no sample size, so treat it as directional. | Similarweb, 2025 |
This is the change that breaks the old decay playbook. Classic decay showed up as a ranking slide you could see in a rank tracker and fix with a rewrite. The 2026 version keeps your position and takes the clicks anyway, which looks identical in Google Analytics and needs a different response: get cited rather than merely ranked. The 25.7% freshness gap in AI citations says recency is part of the price of entry. For the channel-level comparison behind this shift, see the organic vs paid search statistics page.
How we calculated the original numbers
Four figures on this page do not appear anywhere else. Here is the arithmetic, so you can check it or change the inputs.
- A 13-month traffic half-life for a decaying page. Animalz measured average weekly decay of 1.21% on the AdEspresso blog in 2018. Weekly survival is 0.9879. The half-life is ln(0.5) / ln(0.9879) = 0.6931 / 0.012174 = 56.9 weeks, or about 13 months. Over a full year the same rate leaves 53.1% of the traffic (0.9879 raised to the 52nd power), so an untouched page loses roughly 47% of its organic traffic per year.
- One refresh buys back 59 weeks of decay. HubSpot's updated and republished posts gained an average of 106% in monthly organic search views, a multiplier of 2.06. At the 1.21% weekly decay rate, recovering 2.06x takes ln(2.06) / 0.012174 = 59.4 weeks. In plain terms, a successful refresh returns a page to roughly where it stood 14 months earlier, which is why an annual refresh cycle is the minimum that keeps a page flat. This figure stacks two soft inputs, HubSpot's programme average and Animalz's single-blog decay rate, so it inherits every weakness of the 1.21% and should be read as an order of magnitude, not a promise.
- A web page half-life of about 14.5 years. Pew found 38% of pages from 2013 were gone by October 2023, so 62% survived ten years. The implied annual survival rate is 0.62 raised to the power of 0.1, which is 0.9533, a loss of 4.67% a year. The half-life is ln(0.5) / ln(0.9533) = 14.5 years. Pages do not vanish as quickly as their traffic does.
- A backlink half-life of about 5.7 years. Ahrefs found 66.5% of links to 2,062,173 sampled websites had rotted over the nine years from January 2013, so 33.5% survived. Annual survival is 0.335 raised to the power of one ninth, which is 0.8856, an 11.4% loss a year. The half-life is ln(0.5) / ln(0.8856) = 5.7 years. Your links decay roughly two and a half times faster than the pages they point at.
What the 2026 numbers actually say
Decay is a compounding problem treated as a monthly one. A 1.21% weekly loss is invisible in a month-over-month report and halves a page inside 13 months. Every reporting rhythm I have worked inside, weekly dashboards and monthly reviews, is too short a window to see it. Quarterly cohort views by publish date catch it; nothing shorter does.
Refreshing is not maintenance, it is the highest-return work on the content team. HubSpot's 92% of leads from older posts and Ahrefs' 72.9% of top-10 pages being three years old point at the same conclusion from opposite directions. The asset that will earn next quarter's pipeline is almost certainly already published, and Siege Media's cadence table tells you which ones are overdue.
In 2026 decay arrives without a ranking drop. Position-one CTR on ordinary informational queries nearly halved in two years while the rankings stayed put. A rank tracker will now show a healthy page that is quietly earning half of what it did. Measure clicks and citations, not positions, and re-date the work that deserves it, because the URLs AI assistants cite run 25.7% fresher on average than the organic results for the same queries (Ahrefs, 2026). The rest of the statistics library covers the channel economics around that shift.
FAQ
What is content decay in SEO?
Content decay is the gradual loss of organic traffic and rankings by a page that once performed, measured by Animalz at an average of 1.21% per week on the AdEspresso blog in 2018. At that rate a page gives up roughly 47% of its organic traffic in a year and half of it in about 13 months.
How fast does blog content lose traffic?
At the 1.21% weekly decay rate Animalz published in 2018, a page keeps half its organic traffic for 57 weeks. The loss is rarely visible month to month, which is why Animalz also found that 97% of a successful post's lifetime traffic arrives after its launch spike and 90% after six months live.
How much traffic does updating an old blog post bring back?
HubSpot raised monthly organic search views on updated and republished posts by an average of 106% (HubSpot, updated June 2025). Animalz recorded a 55% weekly traffic increase and over 30,000 extra pageviews from a single refresh in 2018. Orbit Media reported 700% quarterly growth on one rewritten article in 2026.
How old are the pages that rank on Google's first page?
72.9% of pages in Google's top 10 are more than three years old and the average number-one result is five years old, from Ahrefs' 2025 study of 1.3 million keywords. In 2017 the equivalent figures were 59% and two years.
How often should you update content to avoid decay?
Page-one content was last updated 730 days ago on average across 17,749 keywords (Siege Media, April 2025), but the cadence varies by query: 143 days for "best software" searches, 320 days for high difficulty keywords and 1,420 days for calculator pages. Match your refresh interval to the query type rather than to the calendar.
What percentage of web pages disappear over time?
38% of the web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible in October 2023, from a sample of about one million pages (Pew Research Center, May 2024). That implies a web page half-life of about 14.5 years, and 8% of the pages Pew captured in its 2023 snapshot were already gone.
Sources
- Ahrefs, 96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google (December 2023)
- Ahrefs, How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google? (2025)
- Ahrefs, 66.5% of Links to Sites in the Last 9 Years Are Dead (updated February 2024)
- Ahrefs, AI Overviews Reduce Clicks: 2026 Update (February 2026)
- Ahrefs, Content Decay: What It Is and How to Fix It (2026)
- Siege Media, How Often Should You Update Your Content? (April 2025, updated June 2025)
- HubSpot, The Blogging Tactic No One Is Talking About: Optimizing the Past (updated June 2025)
- Orbit Media Studios, 2026 Blogging Statistics (2026)
- Orbit Media Studios, How to Update Content for SEO (2026)
- Animalz, Content Refresh Strategy (data from 2018)
- Animalz, The Science Behind 100,000-View Blog Posts (2018)
- Pew Research Center, When Online Content Disappears (May 2024)
- Klein et al., Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot, PLOS ONE (December 2014)
- Zittrain, Albert and Lessig, Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations, Harvard Law Review Forum (2014)
- Internet Archive, More Than 9 Million Broken Links on Wikipedia Are Now Rescued (October 2018)
- Backlinko and BuzzSumo, We Analyzed 912 Million Blog Posts (February 2019)
- SparkToro and Similarweb, In 2026, Less Than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click (June 2026)
- Similarweb, The Impact of Generative AI on Publishers (2025)
- Semrush, Content Audit guide citing State of Content Marketing (2023)
- Search Engine Journal, Google Freshness Update (covering Google's November 2011 update)
Methodology. Numbers were collected in September 2026 and checked against the original publisher's page, not against other statistics roundups. Vendor claims without a stated sample or method were excluded, which is why several widely circulated refresh-uplift percentages do not appear here. Content decay is an under-measured field: the best decay-rate and link-rot studies date from 2014 to 2024 and are labelled with their year in every row, because nobody has rerun them at comparable scale. The four computed figures are marked as computed and their arithmetic is shown in full. Last updated 20 September 2026.