Content Churn In Google Is High

here today, gone tomorrow, that's the reality of today's SERPs

Author

Sean Markey
March 12, 2025

March 12, 2025

Oh no I’m getting into a bad habit where these are coming up much later than I intend and then I spend the intro to each email talking about how it’s late and it becomes a meme of itself.

In my defense, things are going well at my consultancy/agency/IDK really know what to call it, but if you want me to help your website rank for things just go to Ranks.com and book a call!

A QUICK WORD FROM CONTENTBRIEFS.COM

If you know the feeling…

Then check out our content briefs, they’ll save your LIFE, FOREVER

Content

Google has content commitment issues

Today I’m covering an article by DOCTOR Peter Meyers of Moz, talking about content churn.

“WTF is Content Churn?"

For any given day, we’re simply looking at what percentage of URLs (page-one, desktop, Google.com/US) did not appear in the previous 30 days. In other words, what results are new, according to recent history. This was measured across the 10,000 queries in our MozCast research project, which extends back to 2014. These queries tend to be high-volume, so-called “head” terms.

The Main Thing:

Content churn increased by 127% between 2019 and 2024 (like my cholesterol, am I right??)

Anyway.

This increase in churn was steady until mid-2023, where it dropped sharply—probably a result of Google taking aim at mass AI-generated content—before rising again in 2024. The long-term implications are pretty significant: a look at a 24-month window show’s that ALMOST HALF of page-one rankings were URLs that hadn’t appeared during the previous two years.

My Take:

It’s painful to see such a stark, concrete image of something you’ve felt in your heart for a while…

Not to be all “back in my day” at you, but I definitely remember when you could build an amazing piece of content, do some good link building work, and ride that wave like a surfer at Nazaré Portugal. Now, you’ve gotta wake up every day fighting for your page one spot, constantly check what your competition is up to, and throw some spice on it to keep the algo interested.

Your pillar content could never hold up the Acropolis in Google’s new high-churn, YOLO world and I just can’t put it any better than that.

As far as my advice on what to do with this knowledge, I guess you’re probably already doing it.

Track content closely, monitor random search intent changes and adapt quickly, generate a bunch of social traffic (if you can) to your article to help show Big G it’s relevant and also so you can keep receiving traffic when you inevitably churn out.

Hit reply and tell me what YOU are doing to fight against content churn (building links, probably. That’s the real answer…)

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Until next time…

sean

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