The Best Content Decay Tools in 2026 (Including the Free Ones)

The short answer. If you have fewer than about 50 pages, use Search Console by hand and don't pay anyone. If you want continuous monitoring at no cost, SEO Gets has the best free tier in this category. If you're on GA4 rather than Search Console, Animalz Revive gives you a free one-off report. If you run SEO tests or manage several sites, SEOTesting ($50/mo) is the mature choice. If you have a team refreshing content at scale, Slate ($499/mo) does detection plus execution. And if you want one site watched continuously for $15–29, that band is where RefreshRadar — the tool I build — sits.

Prices below were checked on 13 August 2026 and every one comes from the vendor's own live pricing page. Vendor roundups in this niche go stale fast: the biggest one on this SERP still quotes a competitor price less than half of what that competitor's pricing page charges today.

I should be upfront: I build one of these tools. So I've done two things to keep this useful. The tool I make is listed inside its price band, not at the top. And I've compared every tool on the one axis nobody else in this category publishes — what baseline each one measures decay against — because that's the thing that actually determines which of your pages get flagged.

The question no roundup answers: compared to what?

Every tool here will tell you a page is "decaying." None of the other comparisons tell you what that word means to each vendor, and the definitions differ enough to change your list completely.

Take the two most common approaches. Peak-anchored detection compares a page against its own all-time best month. Rolling-baseline detection compares recent weeks against the weeks immediately before them. Run both on the same site and you get different pages:

• Peak-anchored flags every page that ever had a spike — a newsletter mention, a seasonal peak, a news cycle — and keeps flagging it forever, because it will never see that month again.
• Rolling-baseline ages those out, but structurally cannot see slow erosion. A page losing 3% a month never drops 20% below its own trailing average, so it slides for two years without ever tripping the alarm.

Neither is wrong. They answer different questions, and knowing which one you bought is the difference between a queue you trust and a queue you learn to ignore.

The other axis worth checking is the data source. Search Console gives you first-party clicks, impressions and position — what actually happened in Google. GA4 gives you sessions, which include every channel and depend on your analytics being clean. Third-party indexes estimate traffic from rank data. They are not interchangeable inputs.

The comparison

Tool	Price (checked 13 Aug 2026)	Data source	Compares against	Ranks by traffic at stake	Verifies recovery
Search Console (by hand)	Free	GSC	Whatever window you pick	You do the maths	You do the maths
SEO Gets	Free · $39 Core · $49 Pro	GSC (+GA4 paid)	Not publicly documented	No	No
Animalz Revive	Free	GA4	12 months of traffic	No	No
Wellows Content Decay	Free	GSC	A threshold you set, plus a 0–100 score it doesn't explain	No	No
RefreshRadar	$29 ($15 founding cohort)	GSC	Last 4 weeks vs median of prior 8	Yes	Yes — 28d after vs 28d before
SEOTesting	$50 · $125 · $375	GSC	All-time peak click month	Yes — clicks lost from peak	Via manually configured tests
Ahrefs	€27 Starter · €119 Lite and up	Own index + GSC	Whatever window you pick	No	No
Semrush	Free · $139 · $199 · $299 · $549	Own index + GSC	Whatever window you pick	No	No
Slate	$499 · $999 · $2,000	GSC + AI visibility	"The page's own historical baseline" — no threshold published	Not published	No

One row deserves a note in fairness to everyone in it: track record. SEOTesting, Ahrefs, Semrush and Slate all have years of customers and public reviews. RefreshRadar has none — it's new, and I have no customer testimonials to show you. That's a real reason to prefer the others, and you should weigh it.

Free: what you can do for nothing

Google Search Console. The honest baseline, and genuinely enough for a lot of sites. It holds 16 months of performance data, which is the raw material every paid tool on this list resells you in a nicer wrapper. Turn on compare mode, open the Pages tab, sort by clicks difference, and you have your decliners. The full walkthrough is here — it takes about ten minutes and costs nothing.

Its limits are real, though. It won't rank pages by what they're worth, it won't remember which ones you already fixed, and it won't tell you next Monday that something changed. You are the scheduler.

SEO Gets — free tier, then $39 Core / $49 Pro. The best free tier in this category by a distance: unlimited connected sites, unlimited team members, and the full 16 months of history at $0, with content-decay tabs on the paid plans. If you want something continuously watching your Search Console data without paying, start here. I couldn't find their decay methodology documented publicly — worth asking before you rely on the flagging.

Animalz Revive — free, and the odd one out because it reads GA4, not Search Console. Connect it, and it analyses twelve months of traffic to show pages that have lost ground. It's a one-off report rather than monitoring, and it's a lead generator for Animalz's agency, which is a fair trade for a free tool that's been running since 2019. If your analytics is GA4-first, it's the fastest way to a decay list.

Wellows' Content Decay Tool — free, connects to Search Console, lets you set your own decay threshold and date range, and returns a list with a predictive 0–100 decay score. The score's method isn't published, which given the section above is worth knowing before you sort by it.

Both Ahrefs and Semrush also have free tiers worth having on any site — Ahrefs' free site tools and Semrush's free plan — though neither is aimed at decay specifically.

$15–50: the band the other roundups skip

This is the gap in the market, and I'm not the only one who's noticed. Slate's own roundup lists its "notable omissions" and includes "limited mid-range options — gap between free tools and $199/month platforms." Three tools live in that gap.

SEO Gets Core ($39) / Pro ($49). The paid tiers add GA4, five years of history on Pro, and the growth and content-decay tabs. If the free tier gets you close and you want more history, this is the cheapest upgrade path in the category.

SEOTesting — $50/mo Single Site ($125 for 5 sites, $375 for 20; 14-day trial, no card). Its Content Decay Report pulls 13 months of Search Console data per page, finds each page's peak click month, and ranks pages by clicks lost from that peak. Click into the peak month and it shows which queries lost ground. It's a mature product with a real customer base, and if you also run SEO split tests or manage more than one site, it does jobs no cheaper tool here does. Its peak-anchored baseline is the trade-off — great at catching long slow erosion, noisy on pages that once spiked. I've written the full comparison rather than re-arguing it here.

RefreshRadar — $29/mo ($15 for the founding cohort), one site, up to 250 pages. This is mine, so take the description as spec, not as praise: it watches every page in your Search Console, flags a page when its last 4 weeks fall 20% or more below the median of the prior 8 (with a 10-clicks-a-week floor), ranks what it finds by estimated clicks per month at stake, and after you mark a page updated it compares the 28 days after against the 28 days before to tell you whether the fix worked. The weekly email is the product. What it is not: multi-site, an SEO suite, or a tool with a single customer review yet.

$119 and up: the suites

Ahrefs — Starter €27/mo, Lite €119/mo, Standard €229, Advanced €419 on the pricing page I loaded today (Ahrefs prices in local currency, so check your own). Semrush — free plan, then $139/mo for the SEO plan, $199 Starter, $299 Pro+, $549 Advanced at list price.

Both are better tools than anything else on this page. Neither is a decay tool. You can absolutely find a declining page in either — pull the report, set the comparison, read the drop — but they report metrics rather than handing you a ranked queue, and nothing in either closes the loop by telling you whether your refresh recovered the traffic. If you're already paying for one because you need backlinks and keyword research, use it for this too. Don't buy one for this.

Slate — Growth $499/mo (1,000 pages), Scale $999 (5,000 pages), Agency $2,000 (10,000 pages), enterprise custom. Detection plus refresh execution plus AI-visibility tracking, with a bulk sheets interface for running refreshes across thousands of URLs. For a content team with a real publishing operation, that combination is worth the money and nothing cheaper replaces it.

Worth flagging for anyone budgeting: Slate's own tools roundup describes its pricing as starting at $199/mo, while the pricing page today opens at $499. I don't know which is the stale one — legacy plan, annual framing, or simply an out-of-date article — but check the live page before you plan around either number. Same advice applies to every figure in this article after a few months, mine included.

When you don't need a tool at all

Three situations where the correct purchase is nothing:

• Under ~50 pages. You can hold your whole site in your head. Open Search Console once a month and you'll notice what moved.
• Pages under ~10 clicks a week. Decay detection is statistics, and small numbers break it. A page going from 6 clicks to 2 is "down 67%" and means nothing. Every honest tool here filters those out; if a tool is flagging them, it's manufacturing work.
• A site under a year old. If your pages never ranked, they're not decaying — that's a different problem, and no decay tool fixes it.

That's a lot of readers, and I'd rather say it than sell to them. The five patterns decay actually makes will tell you inside ten minutes whether you have this problem at all. And if you'd rather do the whole job for nothing, a spreadsheet genuinely can — two Search Console exports and eight formulas get you the same ranked list, and that piece is also honest about when the spreadsheet stops being worth maintaining.

How to choose

• "I have 30 posts and a spreadsheet habit." Search Console, by hand, free — here's the build.
• "I want something watching it for me but I can't spend anything." SEO Gets free tier.
• "My data lives in GA4, not Search Console." Animalz Revive.
• "I manage five client sites and run SEO tests." SEOTesting.
• "I have a content team refreshing dozens of pages a month." Slate, or the suite you already pay for.
• "One site, a couple of hundred posts, I just want to be told what to fix and whether it worked." That's the band RefreshRadar was built for — alongside SEO Gets and SEOTesting, which solve it differently.

Three of those six aren't my product, and that's not diplomacy. A tool used on the wrong site produces a list nobody acts on, which is how people end up believing the whole category is noise.

Before you pay anyone, look at your own data

Whichever way you go, the first move is the same: find out whether you have decay worth paying to monitor. Pick the pages that are actually losing clicks, rank them by what's at stake, fix the top one, and check whether it recovered. If that loop produces nothing, no tool on this page will change that.

Connect Search Console read-only and see what's decaying on your site — free — no card, about 30 seconds, and we never post or change anything. You'll get your three worst-decaying pages with the clicks/month at stake on each, which is enough to judge whether this problem is worth $29 to you, or whether the free options above already cover it. If nothing on your site is decaying, we'll tell you that instead.