A content audit is broader than a purely technical SEO audit — it looks at content quality signals (is this still accurate, is it still the best answer to its target query, does it duplicate another page) rather than just crawlability and indexing mechanics, though the two audits often run together since content decisions frequently trigger technical follow-up like redirects. The typical output is a spreadsheet scoring every URL against traffic trend, backlink count, content age, and a manual quality judgment, sorted into action buckets: keep, refresh, merge, or prune. Running a content audit annually (or after any period of rapid publishing) catches content decay before it accumulates into a larger site-quality problem, and it's often the first step before a larger content strategy reset.
Example
An annual content audit of 300 blog posts finds 45 are outdated with stale statistics, 30 duplicate the topic of a newer, better post, and 15 have zero traffic and no reason to keep existing.
Related terms
Related Reading
404 Error
A 404 error is the standard HTTP status code returned when a requested page doesn't exist on the server — the classic 'page not found' response.
A/B Testing (SEO)
A/B testing in SEO is the practice of showing two versions of a page element — usually a title tag, meta description, or on-page element — to see which one earns a better click-through rate or ranking outcome.
AI Citation
An AI citation happens when an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini references or links to a specific page as the source for part of its answer.
