Old blog posts don’t just look dated—they might actually be dragging you down. Welcome to the age of the content cleanse.

I’ve written thousands of articles over the years—some for clients, some for my agency, some for myself, some because no one stopped me. Most were written long before anyone had heard of generative AI, let alone asked it to write them a listicle. They were old school. Painstakingly-researched. Over-scrutinized. Carefully optimized. 

So the idea of deleting any of them—especially the keyword-stuffed masterpieces I once convinced myself were genius—feels like murder.

But here we are.

Brands are quietly gutting their websites. Content teams are slashing thousands of pages. Not because of broken links or brand refreshes—but because the algorithms told them to. Turns out, that 2016 thought piece on “The Future of Social Listening” may be doing more harm than good.

If content was king, then legacy content might be the over-the-hill court jester—still hanging around, no longer funny, and stinking up the place.

So why is this happening now? And should you be doing the same?

The New Content Economy: Why Age Is a Liability

We used to treat websites like libraries—more content meant more chances to be found. But now, AI and search systems are less interested in quantity, more in quality, cohesion, and clarity.

According to a 2023 study by Ahrefs—a widely used SEO analysis tool—nearly 96.55% of indexed pages receive no organic traffic at all. Google’s Helpful Content update doubled down: sites with large volumes of outdated or unhelpful content may be downgraded overall—not just on a page-by-page basis. That blog post from 2020 about face masks during the pandemic? It could be undermining your 2024 product launch page.

The impact is playing out globally. CNET, for example, deleted thousands of older articles and immediately saw search rankings rise. IBM overhauled developer documentation, stripping out half its old pages to improve clarity for AI-based retrieval. And Shopify removed more than 2,000 aging blog posts to improve page performance and boost conversions.

Old Content Confuses AI—And That’s the Ballgame Now

Search engines are one thing. But AI is now the first point of contact for millions.

Gartner reported that 30% of users in developed markets now begin product research using an AI tool instead of Google—and the number is rising. These tools aren’t just giving users ten blue links. They’re synthesizing answers.

And that means they’re actually judging your content. If your site includes outdated facts, broken links, or pre-pandemic predictions, it’s marked as untrustworthy by tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity (an AI search engine that cites sources), and Gemini (Google’s own AI assistant). They’re not just indexing. They’re evaluating.

If they don’t trust your content, you don’t get quoted. You don’t get summarized. You don’t even show up.

It’s why IBM rebuilt their developer search around AI-ready summaries—and why brands from finance to fashion are quietly culling the archives to keep their trust signals high.

Yes, Redating Can Work. But Only If You Earn It.

Changing the publish date on an article is a step in the right direction. But Google’s Search Liaison John Mueller made it plain: “Blindly updating dates without significant changes to the content won’t do anything useful for SEO.”

So changing the date without updating the content is not strategy—it’s window dressing. Google knows it. And so will the AI. 

Meanwhile, companies like HubSpot and Moz—major players in the SEO and marketing automation space—routinely redate blog posts, but only after fully updating them: swapping in fresh stats, reworking intros, tightening structure. It’s a remix, not a reprint.

You can and should do the same. But only after asking: does this deserve to live?

To reinforce transparency and trust, it may even be advisable to tag refreshed posts as “Updated” or “Refreshed,” either in the header or intro, so both readers and search engines understand the post has been meaningfully revised. This helps preserve SEO authority while signaling that you’re keeping content fresh for the right reasons.

Moz’s own data showed that a small portion of refreshed posts drove the majority of their year’s SEO growth. That’s not magic. That’s maintenance.

When Deletion is Strategy

Brands are finally waking up to the strategic value of content pruning. According to the 2023 Content, Seriously strategy report, 75% of high-growth marketing teams audited or deleted more than 25% of their web content last year.

Semrush, a leading SEO platform, ran a pruning initiative that delivered a 79% increase in organic traffic in just six months. Shopify, after deleting thousands of old posts and consolidating the rest, saw stronger conversion rates. Zendesk cut 40% of old help content and watched bounce rates drop by 20%, while customer satisfaction scores ticked upward.

This isn’t spring cleaning. This is triage.

What to Cut, What to Keep, What to Update

Here’s a brutally efficient framework for culling content:

1. Keep anything that’s evergreen, high-traffic, or currently ranking.
2. Update anything with potential, using new facts, quotes, images or SEO elements; consider labeling them “Updated” or “Refreshed.”
3. Mercilessly delete or de-index anything with zero traffic, low relevance, or confusing overlaps.

Use tools like Ahrefs, Google Search Console (Google’s free traffic and index diagnostics tool), and Screaming Frog (a site crawler used by SEO pros) to pinpoint low performers.

And remember: clarity trumps quantity in the age of AI synthesis.

Curate, Don’t Hoard

This is a mindset shift. We’re not writing to fill a vault. We’re writing to train the machine. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini—they’re hunting for clean, consistent, current answers. Your website is either helping them…or holding them back.

Yes, it stings to delete content I spent days writing during a caffeine-fueled sprint in 2014. But if that article can’t help a reader—or an AI—today, it’s not content. It’s clutter.

So time for a bit of spring content cleaning.

Sources: Gartner AI Usage Forecast, 2023, Ahrefs: 96.55% of Pages Get No Traffic (ahrefs.com/blog/search-traffic-study), Semrush Content Audit Case Study, 2023, Content, Seriously: Content Strategy Report 2023, Shopify Blog Cleanup, 2022, IBM Developer Documentation Revamp, 2023, John Mueller, Google Search Liaison, on Content Freshness, HubSpot & Moz SEO Update Strategies, Zendesk Content Performance Stats, 2024, CNET SEO Performance Case, 2023.