Query Decay Map: track searches gaining or losing clicks

The Query Decay Map (titled Query Decay Heatmap in the app) does for searches what the Content Decay Map does for pages: one row per query, one column per month or week, each cell shaded against the query's own best period, and a status for every row. It shows whether a traffic loss comes from a few big searches drying up or from many small ones, and which searches are on the rise.

Run it

The map defaults to the last six months. Set a narrower or longer range in the date picker, then choose:

• Branded: All, Branded or Non-Branded, using the brand terms saved for the property. Brand demand moves with marketing and news, so separate it before judging SEO.
• Query contains: a word to focus on, such as a product name.
• Rows: the top 50, 100 or 200 queries by clicks.
• Month or Week columns, the metric to display, the change threshold and the shading colour.

Press Run Analysis. Daily query rows are fetched (up to 50,000), grouped into the columns, and the top queries kept. The header badge shows whether the rows came from live Search Console or stored history.

How queries are rated

The rules are the same as for pages and always use clicks per day in each period:

• Severe: the current period is at least 50% below the query's best earlier period.
• Moderate: at least 25% below it.
• Growing: within 10% of the best period and more than 10% above the average of the previous three.
• New: no clicks until the last two periods.
• Stable: everything else.

Each row also carries a 0 to 100 decay score (70% drop from peak, 30% recent trend), its peak period and its average position over the last seven days. The status tabs above the grid filter to one group, and the totals row reflects whatever is filtered.

Losing a query is not always losing a ranking

When a query fades, check three things before rewriting anything:

1. Did its impressions fall too? If impressions and clicks fell together while position held, fewer people are searching. Seasonality and fading interest are not fixable on the page.
2. Did its position slip? Then a competitor or another of your pages overtook it. Open the query to see which URLs it showed.
3. Did CTR drop at the same position? The results page probably changed, such as a new feature above the organic results.

Rare searches are partly hidden by Google's privacy rules. Search Console leaves very infrequent queries out of query-level data to protect users (how Search Console counts data), so the long tail of this map is always incomplete. Property Sampling measures how much.

How AutoPSEO helps

A growing query your site has no page for is a topic: add it in the content engine and it is routed, reviewed against your existing pages and written in your site's format (how topics are chosen). The engine's daily Search Console scan already looks for such searches. A fading query whose page AutoPSEO manages is picked up by the weekly refresh check (Keeping articles fresh).

Related: Content Decay Map, New & Lost Rankings, Topic Clusters.