What is Content decay?

Content decay is the gradual loss of search ranking, traffic, and citation strength a piece of content experiences over time, even when nothing about the content itself changes. Decay happens because the surrounding ranking environment evolves — competitors publish fresher coverage, the topic's entity graph shifts, freshness signals depreciate, and search-rater feedback re-trains ranking models. Industry studies show the median commercial content asset loses 30–50% of its peak organic traffic within 18 months without active refreshing. The defense is a content-refresh cadence: pages on high-traffic terms get reviewed every 6 months, fresh statistics added, examples updated to the current year, and last-updated dates legitimately bumped. In AI search, decay is even sharper — LLMs heavily prefer recently-updated content because outdated facts are an expensive error mode for AI assistants.