Content Decay Detector
Paste a published article or URL with its age and AI scores content freshness, flags stale claims, identifies missing context, and prioritizes refresh work.
How it works
A short, focused workflow — input, run, read the result.
Paste the article
Add the article text or URL you want to audit for decay.
Add publish context
Include publish date, last updated date, target keyword, or traffic decline notes.
Generate the audit
Review freshness score, stale claims, missing context, and recommended updates.
Refresh strategically
Update high-priority sections first, then recheck rankings and impressions.
What is content decay, and why does it silently drain organic traffic?
Content decay is the gradual loss of organic visibility as a page becomes outdated, competitors improve, or search intent shifts. Most sites lose 10-15% of traffic a year to decay and never notice because the drop is spread across hundreds of pages.
What this content decay detector finds
Every signal that separates a page that needs a refresh from a page that needs to be retired.
- Freshness score — 0-100 score combining publish age, claim recency, and topic velocity to predict traffic decline risk.
- Stale claim flag — highlights specific sentences, statistics, and recommendations that look outdated against the current topic state.
- Missing context detection — identifies subtopics competitors now cover that the article does not, the most common refresh opportunity.
- Date and recency signals — checks for visible publish and update dates, which Google weighs on freshness-sensitive queries.
- Refresh priority list — ranks fixes by impact so you tackle the high-priority sections first and skip the low-value edits.
- Decay threshold marker — flags pages where the freshness score signals the 1.5% monthly decline pattern has likely started.
- Source currency check — flags citations older than 24 months on time-sensitive topics like SEO, AI, finance, and health.
- Pruning vs. refresh verdict — recommends whether a page is a refresh candidate, a merge candidate, or a prune candidate based on decay depth.
Who uses this content decay detector
Editorial teams who need to know which old pages are worth a refresh and which are not.
You have 500 articles on a 5-year-old domain and traffic is down 18% year over year, spread across hundreds of pages.
Score every page, find the top 50 decay candidates, refresh them in a quarter, recover the lost traffic.
Your blog has 200 posts and you suspect half of them are quietly losing rankings to fresher competitors.
Audit the library in batches of 20, prioritize refreshes by impact, stop wasting time on pages that won't recover.
You run quarterly content audits for 8 clients and need a fast way to identify decay across all of them.
Run the detector on every client's top 100 pages, deliver a refresh roadmap per client in a single afternoon.
You wrote a post on 'best AI tools' 18 months ago and it has slipped from position 2 to position 9.
Score the post, see exactly which claims are stale, refresh the top 5 sections, recover position 3-4.
Your 10,000-page knowledge base has thousands of decaying pages and you need to prioritize a refresh backlog.
Triage the library with the freshness score, focus the next quarter on the 500 highest-impact refreshes.
Your 300 product review posts lose traffic every time a new model launches, and you need to know which to update first.
Score every review, refresh the top 30 in time for the next product cycle, hold rankings through launch.
Related glossary terms
Want a deeper dive? These glossary entries explain the concepts behind this tool.
Frequently Asked
Questions
Everything you need to know about content decay detector.
Content decay is the gradual loss of organic visibility as a page becomes outdated, competitors improve, or search intent changes.
Pruning decides whether a page should be deleted, merged, or rewritten. Decay detection focuses on refreshing a still-useful page.
No. It uses the article text and context you provide. For live traffic trends, compare the output with Google Search Console data.
AI can flag likely stale claims, dates, and missing context, but you should verify important facts with primary sources before editing.
For important SEO pages, review freshness every quarter or whenever rankings, impressions, or conversions decline.
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