A content audit is an orderly review of every page a website has published, to measure how each one performs and decide what to do with it: keep it, update it, merge it with another page or remove it. The version of a content audit I see most often is an 800-row spreadsheet, one row per URL, that the team starts with plenty of enthusiasm and abandons around row 140.
The problem with that spreadsheet is that it treats every row the same, and the data says they are not the same. We looked at Search Console for 190 company websites in the US and Latin America between September 20 and October 17, 2026: at the median, the 10 pages with the most clicks took 69% of the organic clicks from Google. On sites with more than 100 pages that got clicks, 10% of those pages drove 80% of the traffic.
My take is that a content audit should start by finding and protecting those few pages, and only then decide what to do with the rest.
What is a content audit?
A content audit is a process for evaluating the content that already exists on your site. It has three parts: an inventory (which pages you have), a measurement (how each one performs against your goals) and a decision for every URL. If there is no decision per URL at the end, you are left with a nice report nobody uses.
You can run a full audit, covering the whole website, or a partial one, covering one section (the blog, the product pages, the landing pages of a campaign). For a first round I would start partial, because it is easier to finish and it shows you where the problems are.
It also helps to separate it from two close cousins. A general SEO audit also reviews crawling, indexing, speed and backlinks, and it is usually the starting point of a complete SEO strategy. Content pruning is one part of the audit, the part that decides what gets removed or consolidated (I explain it in detail in my guide to content pruning).
What is a content audit for?
The benefits I have seen actually move something:
- Knowing which content holds up your traffic. If one of those pages drops, you want to find out before your boss does.
- Finding pages you can update instead of writing a new one from scratch. In my experience, it tends to be the marketing work with the best return per hour.
- Spotting pages that compete with each other for the same search and should probably be merged.
- Cleaning up before a redesign or a migration. Migrating 400 pages nobody visits costs time and money.
- Seeing gaps: topics your audience searches for that have no page of their own on your site.
- Having a baseline to adjust your content strategy with business data.
All of that depends on how concentrated your traffic is in a few pieces of content. Here are the numbers.
How many pages actually drive your traffic?
The study's question: on each site, what share of Google clicks goes to the 10 best-performing pages, and how many pages it takes to reach 80%. These are the aggregates (all figures are medians per site):
| Segment | Sites | Page 1 (% of clicks) | Top 10 (% of clicks) | Pages to reach 80% | % of pages with clicks that make 80% | % of pages with impressions and 0 clicks | Home (% of clicks) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All | 190 | 28.5% | 69.2% (p25 43.6%, p75 84.9%) | 25 | 11.4% | 66.3% | 27.7% |
| US | 110 | 26.8% | 60.8% | 51 | 10.5% | 64.9% | 22.5% |
| Latin America | 35 | 36.7% | 76.6% | 13 | 14.0% | 57.9% | 28.1% |
| Under 300 pages | 61 | 44.1% | 88.3% | 5 | 14.3% | 69.6% | 61.6% |
| 300 to 3,000 pages | 72 | 28.4% | 67.4% | 27.5 | 10.6% | 67.8% | 25.4% |
| 3,000 pages or more | 57 | 13.2% | 36.1% | 438 | 9.9% | 59.9% | 11.6% |
Size bands count pages with impressions in Search Console. And across the 111 sites with 100 or more pages with clicks, the curve looks like this: 1% of the pages with clicks drove 49% of clicks, 5% drove 71%, 10% drove 80% (p25 69%, p75 87%), 20% drove 88% and half of the pages drove 96%.
In other words, the famous 80/20 rule of SEO looks more like 80/10, because 80% of the clicks come from 10% of the pages that get clicks.
So I would not only talk about other people's sites, I checked my own content over the same window. In those 28 days, anafernandezseo.com had 196 pages with impressions, 34 with at least one click and 287 clicks. The top 10 pages drove 90% of the clicks, 4 pages drove 80%, and a single guide (the one on analysis matrices) took 192 clicks, two thirds of the total. This blog publishes new content almost every day (and yes, that number stung a little).
Does it change with site size?
The top 10 figure changes, but the shape of the curve holds. With fewer than 300 pages with impressions, the top 10 take 88% of the clicks, because there is barely any other content to share them. Between 300 and 3,000 pages it drops to 67%, and at 3,000 or more it reaches 36%.
What does not change is the share of pages with clicks that drives 80% of the traffic: 14%, 11% and 10% across those three bands. Among the 40 sites with 3,000 pages or more and a complete page list, 10% of the pages with clicks drove 80% (in that band it takes a median of 438 pages to reach 80%, so the audit is no longer done row by row).
On a large site I group pages by template or URL pattern (product pages, categories, articles, local landing pages) and pull aggregated metrics for each group in Search Console. A change to a title template touches thousands of URLs at once, so the content audit also has to look at the group.
By region, the top 10 weighs 61% in the US and 77% in Latin America, but the Latin American sites in the sample are smaller (476 pages with impressions at the median versus 1,535), so the difference cannot be attributed to the country.
What about the homepage?
The homepage was the page with the most clicks on 73% of the sites and took 28% of the clicks (median; p25 11%, p75 52%). A good part of those clicks comes from people who searched for the brand name, as we saw in the study on branded and non-branded traffic. That is why, in a content audit, I move the homepage and branded searches to a separate row: they inflate the top and tell you little about which content attracts new demand for the business.
How to do a content audit step by step
Most guides suggest five or six steps that end in an action plan. What I change is the order of priority inside them.
1. Set one goal and a few metrics
Pick one main goal for the audit: more organic traffic, more conversions or a tidier site before a migration. Each goal calls for its own metrics, and if you try to look at all of them at once the spreadsheet becomes unmanageable.
For an SEO goal, I would use clicks, impressions and position from Search Console. For a business goal, I would add GA4 conversions by landing page (forms, quote requests, purchases).
Two or three indicators per goal are enough. If the ones you use today do not connect with the business, my guide on what a KPI is is a good starting point.
2. Build the URL inventory
The inventory is the list of every URL you are going to evaluate, in a spreadsheet with one row per URL. There are three sources and it pays to cross them:
- Search Console, Performance report by page: it tells you which URLs Google already shows. It is the inventory closest to reality, because only URLs with impressions appear.
- A crawl with Screaming Frog or a similar tool: it shows the URLs it finds by following the links on your site.
- The sitemap (XML sitemap), with the list of URLs you declare as important.
The differences between the three sources tell you a lot. A page that is in the sitemap but has no impressions may have an indexing problem (I explain it in how to index a page on Google). And one that shows up in Search Console but not in the crawl may be an orphan page or a version with parameters.
For each URL, note the page type or template, date, title and the main keyword it should serve.
3. Gather the data for each page
Now you add data from the last 3 to 12 months to each piece of content: clicks, impressions, CTR and position from Google Search Console; sessions and conversions from Google Analytics; and, if you want, backlinks from Ahrefs or Semrush.
Two precautions: use a clean data window with equivalent periods (if your business is seasonal, November against November) and read the metrics together. In GA4, bounce rate is calculated as the inverse of engaged sessions, and a page with a high bounce rate may be answering what the person was looking for quickly. Metadata (title and description) also affects CTR.
4. Sort by clicks and mark the 80% cutoff
This is the step I add to every content audit. Sort the sheet by clicks from highest to lowest, add a column with cumulative clicks and mark the row where you reach 80% of the total.
Everything above that line is your protected group. Based on the study, on a typical site with 300 to 3,000 pages that will be about 25 or 30 URLs, which get reviewed first and one by one. Below the line are the volume decisions, which are made by group according to the goal of the audit.
5. Classify: keep, update, merge or remove
Each URL gets a decision. These are the criteria I use:
| Decision | When | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Keep | It is in the 80% group, the information is still current and it converts | Check monthly that it does not drop; small, measured changes |
| Update | It has impressions and a position between 5 and 20, or it lost clicks versus last year | New data, a better answer to the search, title and description |
| Merge | Two or more pages compete for the same search (cannibalization) | Combine them into the strongest one and redirect the others |
| Remove | No meaningful clicks or impressions in 12 months, no backlinks and no business value | Delete with a 410 or 404, or redirect if there is an equivalent URL |
Be careful removing new pages: a URL published a month ago may simply have no data yet. And when you merge because of cannibalization, the page that receives the 301 redirect has to actually answer what the other pages answered. I explained when a 404 matters and when it does not in an article for Ahrefs on the 404 error (in Spanish).
6. Build the action plan
The action plan is the list of tasks with an owner and a date, and it is prioritized by clicks at stake. First, the pages in the protected group that dropped; then the ones that can climb with an update (lots of impressions, average position between 5 and 20); and last, cleaning up the rest.
Three things that come out of the audit go into the same plan:
- Internal links: the pages you want to push should get links from the ones that already have traffic.
- Content gaps: topics with demand that have no page of their own, which move into the content marketing calendar.
- Tracking: note the date of each change so you can compare 28 days before and after.
A Status column and a Priority column in the same spreadsheet are enough to start.
What should you do with pages that get impressions and zero clicks?
At the median of 173 sites with a complete page list, 66% of the pages that appeared on Google did not get a single click in 28 days (p25 53%, p75 77%). On my site it was 83%. Before removing them, it is worth understanding what that content is, because Search Console does not let you separate the reasons, and four things usually get mixed together:
- URLs with parameters or duplicates (filters, sorting, UTM tags) that split one page into several. You fix them with a canonical tag or by linking to the clean version.
- Pages that show up very low, at position 30 or 50, for long-tail queries. They collect impressions without anyone seeing them (my article on long-tail keywords shows how many clicks they really bring).
- Content that does not match the intent of the query it shows up for. Here it makes sense to update it or move the topic to another page.
- Pages with a good position and a low CTR, where the title and description do not convince (here I explain what CTR is and how to read it).
Only after ruling all that out do you get the group that goes into the action plan for removal.
How often should you run a content audit?
Guides recommend one or two audits a year, and for a full content audit that seems reasonable to me. On large sites or sites that publish a lot, I would run a full audit once a year plus a 15-minute monthly review to keep an eye on the protected group: if one of those pages loses clicks, you find out within a few weeks.
What tools do you need?
Free tools take you pretty far:
- Google Search Console: clicks, impressions and position by page. It is the foundation.
- Google Analytics (GA4): conversions and behavior by landing page.
- A spreadsheet (Google Sheets or Excel) for the inventory and the decisions.
- Screaming Frog, free up to 500 URLs, to crawl the site.
- Ahrefs or Semrush (paid), if you need backlinks and competitor keywords for your SEO strategy.
On a large site, the Search Console export falls short (it stops at 1,000 rows), so it is better to use the API.
How was this analysis done?
The sample is 190 company websites in the US and Latin America that I have access to (my own and clients', always anonymous and only in aggregate). Out of 357 Search Console properties, unverified and subfolder properties were dropped, and one site per domain was kept: 229 candidates. Before looking at any results, the inclusion rule was set: 1,000 or more impressions and 200 or more clicks in web search during the period.
The period is 28 days, from September 20 to October 17, 2026, after the Search Console impressions error and after Google's change to results per page. For each site we calculated the share of clicks for page 1, the top 3 and the top 10, how many pages it takes to reach 50% and 80%, the percentage of pages with impressions and 0 clicks, and the weight of the homepage. We report medians with 25th and 75th percentiles. As a check, the click-weighted average for the top 10 is 44% versus the 69% median, so no giant site moves the median.
The limits, so you read it correctly:
- It is a convenience sample, mostly US sites. It does not represent the whole web.
- Search Console counts URLs: parameter or duplicate versions can push up the percentage of pages without clicks.
- 17 very large sites have their page list capped at 25,000 rows. They are included in the top 10 and the pages to reach 80%, but not in the zero-click percentage or the curve.
- Some brands have more than one domain (for example, one per country) and count separately.
- Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in web search in Search Console and cannot be separated.
- It measures concentration. Why some pages win and others lose is a different question, which this analysis does not answer.
Wrapping up
If you have an hour this week, the first step is simple: open Search Console, export the pages report for the last 28 days, sort it by clicks and mark where you reach 80%. That short list is your first content audit, with a clear goal: check that each of those pages is still current, that it converts and that it gets internal links from the rest of the site. The 800-row spreadsheet can wait until next week (and you will probably finish it, because now you know which rows matter).