<b>How fast does content decay, and does query type change the rate?</b>

<b>How fast does content decay, and does query type change the rate?</b>

"Refresh your content" is universal advice. But decay rates aren't uniform, and treating them as such wastes refresh budget.

I tracked clicks-over-time for ~3,000 URLs binned by query intent and measured each cohort's half-life — months until traffic fell to 50% of peak (excluding pages that never peaked).

— "Best/top/2024-style" commercial queries: median half-life ~7 months. Brutal. These need scheduled refreshes.
— Evergreen how-to/definitional queries: half-life ~26 months. Slow burners.
— News-adjacent queries: half-life under 3 months, as expected.
— Surprise: tutorials tied to software UIs decayed almost as fast as commercial pages — version changes silently rot them.

The practical model: tag every URL by decay class, not by age. Refreshing a 26-month-half-life definition page on a 6-month calendar is wasted effort; ignoring a software tutorial for a year guarantees rot.

We estimated that reallocating refresh effort toward the two fast-decay classes recovered more clicks per editor-hour than blanket refreshing — though I only have a clean before/after for one site.

Method note: GSC click curves, peak-aligned; half-life via interpolation.

Confidence: medium.