How durable content and campaign bursts pay back differently
Nearly three quarters of pages in Google's top 10 are more than three years old, and under 2% of new pages get there within a year. That arithmetic decides how a small team should split its week.
Contents
Durable pages and campaign bursts are not two versions of the same investment. Ahrefs reported in May 2025 that 72.9% of pages in Google's top 10 are more than three years old, and that only 1.74% of new pages reach the top 10 within a year. A campaign buys attention once. A durable page buys it repeatedly.
Key takeaways
- Ahrefs found 72.9% of top-10 pages are over three years old, and that the average first-ranking page is about five years old.
- Only 1.74% of new pages reached the top 10 within a year; restricted to pages with real English content, the figure was 6.11%.
- Ahrefs' 2023 index study put 96.55% of pages at zero traffic from Google, so publishing volume alone is not the lever.
- AI assistants cite pages averaging 1,064 days old against 1,432 days for Google's organic results, which favors updates over new URLs.
The pages that win are old
The May 2025 Ahrefs study aged the top 10 across 1.3 million random keywords and tracked 1 million random URLs to see how fast new pages arrive.
Pages under a year old take 13.7% of top-10 positions. Pages over three years old take 72.9%. The average first-ranking page is about five years old, up from two years when the same study ran in 2017.
That is not an argument against publishing. It is an argument about when the return arrives. A page published this quarter competes with pages that have accumulated links and query coverage since 2020.
Ahrefs analyzed 1.3 million random keywords in May 2025 and found 72.9% of pages in Google's top 10 were more than three years old, while only 13.7% were less than a year old. Source: Ahrefs, 15 May 2025.
Publishing more is not the lever
The other half of that study is blunter: 1.74% of new pages reached the top 10 within a year. Filtering to 2 million URLs with real English content raises it to 6.11%, the honest upper bound for a page that is written rather than generated.
Ahrefs' index study, published in December 2023, found 96.55% of about 14 billion pages received no traffic from Google, and another 1.94% received one to ten visits a month. Volume without differentiation lands in that 96%.
The ceiling is also falling. SparkToro and Datos measured that for every 1,000 US Google searches in their 2024 clickstream study, 360 clicks reached a site outside Google's own properties, with 58.5% of US searches ending in no click at all.
What a campaign burst is actually for
Campaigns are not the weak option. They are the right tool when the deadline is real: a launch, a season, an event, a price change. They convert existing attention into demand inside a window you control.
What they do not do is accumulate. A burst returns most of its value in the first weeks and stops, which is why measuring it needs an attribution method you can defend rather than a screenshot of a spike.
The failure is asking bursts to do a job they cannot. Ten campaign posts in a quarter do not become an evergreen library, because they were written against a date rather than a question people keep asking.
Refreshing beats republishing
HubSpot's analysis of nearly 20,000 customer blog posts, last updated in November 2023, defines a compounding post as one producing the same traffic as six decaying posts. Compounding is a property of the page, not of the calendar.
Updating is now doubly worth it. Ahrefs' July 2025 citation study of 16.975 million cited URLs across seven AI platforms found cited pages averaged 1,064 days old against 1,432 for Google organic, and 909 days since last update against 1,047.
An update keeps the page's age and links while resetting its accuracy. A new URL on the same topic throws both away.
Across 16.975 million URLs cited by seven AI assistants, the average cited page was 1,064 days old and had been updated 909 days earlier, compared with 1,432 and 1,047 days for Google's organic results. Source: Ahrefs, 28 July 2025.
How a small team should split the week
Work the arithmetic. If under 2% of new pages reach the top 10 in a year while nearly three quarters of the winners are over three years old, the expected value of the eleventh new post is lower than the expected value of fixing the page already sitting at position eleven.
A workable split for a team of two or three is one durable piece a month, one refresh cycle a month across the pages that already earn traffic, and campaign work sized to the dates the business actually has. That order survives a quarter with someone on leave, the real test of an operating system for a small studio.
It also needs content modelled so it can be updated in place rather than rebuilt, which is the argument behind modelling content so it survives a redesign.
FAQ
How long before durable content pays back?
Longer than a quarter. Ahrefs measured 1.74% of new pages reaching the top 10 within twelve months, so review at twelve months, with a check at six to see whether the page is gaining impressions and links or sitting flat.
Should we stop running campaigns?
No. Campaigns are the correct instrument for a dated event, and they reach audiences that search never will. The mistake is expecting a campaign asset to keep earning after the date, or judging a durable page by a campaign's reporting window.
Which pages should we refresh first?
The ones with traffic that is declining while their query still has demand, then the ones ranking between five and fifteen where accuracy is the gap. Leave pages at zero traffic alone until you have decided whether the topic deserves a page at all.
What to measure
Track two curves separately: campaign response inside its window, and organic traffic per durable page by month of publication. Set the refresh cycle to a fixed date rather than a feeling, and report both alongside revenue under the rules that govern board-level metrics for a brand investment. In six months the pages published this quarter will show whether they climb or stay flat, and that curve is the only evidence worth arguing from.
