Why it matters to a buyer
A blog built over several years can lose a large share of its traffic quietly, one page at a time, while the total post count keeps growing, which hides the problem from a simple content count. For a buyer, this matters because it changes what a healthy content plan looks like: publishing new pages is not enough if older, previously strong pages are losing ground just as fast, so a report should track traffic by page over time, not only the newest additions.
How it is measured or applied
Decay is found by pulling twelve months of page-level organic traffic from Search Console or analytics and flagging pages with a sustained downward trend rather than normal seasonal movement. Each flagged page is checked against current search results for that query to see what changed: fresher competitor content, a shift in what the query now expects, or facts and prices that are simply out of date. The fix is usually a substantive update, new information, updated data, added sections, rather than a light edit, and the page's date is only changed once the content itself has meaningfully changed.
Sources
- Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, Google Search Central
