Do Evergreen Content Strategies Still Work Well?

Do evergreen content strategies still work in 2025? Yes, next question.

Okay, I’ll be less flippant about it. There’s actually an interesting discussion to be found here, and there are some people who think that evergreen content is “dead” and recommend a different kind of marketing. So what’s going on, what’s happening behind the scenes to make them think that, and what should you be doing?

Let’s dig in and talk about it.

What is Evergreen Content?

First, let’s start with the definition of the topic we’re discussing. If you think you already know what evergreen content is, I still recommend reading this section because there are some important details that will matter later.

Evergreen content is content written about a topic that has ongoing, sustained interest. The topics you choose are things people will pretty much always want to know.

The idea is that you pick a topic that people are searching for now, people have been searching for over the last few years, and people are going to be searching for in the coming years. What kinds of topics are these? Well, “What is evergreen content?” is one example. As long as content marketing exists, and as long as the term “evergreen” exists in the context of marketing, this question will be relevant.

Other examples include things like:

• A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing a New Business Plan
• How Does a Roth IRA Work?
• The History of Digital Cameras
• How to Set Up a New Shopify Storefront
• 55 Culinary Terms You Need to Know to Be a Chef
• The Ultimate Packing Checklist for Tropical Travel

When you search for examples of evergreen content, you rarely actually see lists of topics like this. Instead, people will tell you formats for content. You’ll see people say that checklists, tutorials, and case studies are forms of evergreen content.

I half agree.

The thing is, evergreen content is not a content format at all. It’s all about the topic of that content. You can write a step-by-step guide to something that won’t be relevant a few months down the line (How to Preorder a Nintendo Switch 2), for example.

Even something like a case study, the subject you choose for your case study can fall out of date, and the data in your study might not be relevant six months or a year down the line. It’s one thing if it’s a case study into your own service, and you can use it to prove the viability of what you offer, but if it’s more of a general industry study, it’s a snapshot in time and won’t be useful down the line.

Keep this in mind because the crux of the issue – whether evergreen content is dead or not – hinges on this bit of semantics.

Why Evergreen Content is Great for Marketing

To know why people chase evergreen content, it’s worth understanding the value it brings to the table. This section is one where, if you have a good understanding of evergreen content, you can safely skip it. That’s why I’m going to keep it short.

• Evergreen content has a long lifespan. Ahrefs once did a study and found that 60% of evergreen content was receiving traffic three years after publication.
• Evergreen content is rich with keywords. Since evergreen content tends to be broad, it can cover a lot of bases, and get you in a lot of search results pages.
• Evergreen content helps build credibility. By showcasing your expertise in a trustworthy and reliable way, you build brand trust, both with Google and with readers.
• Evergreen content becomes linkbait. People like linking to resources that stand the test of time, so you gain a lot of SEO value mechanically from publishing that sort of content.

It’s no wonder that it’s a highly sought-after kind of content.

Evergreen content has drawbacks, of course. It’s highly unlikely to go viral, so it has a kind of “soft cap” to the amount of traffic it can bring in over a short time. It tends to have a lot of competition already, especially since it’s harder for evergreen content to “expire,” so competition across the years can still be fierce. It’s harder to stand out since evergreen topics tend to have a “right answer” or at least a consensus, so you tend to have a lot of similarities to your competition.

None of that means evergreen content isn’t good; it just means that other kinds of content should also play a role in your marketing strategy.

Why Some are Saying Evergreen Content is Dead

Now, let’s dig into the crux of the topic today: why are some people saying that evergreen content is dead?

Truthfully, I don’t think many people are actually saying this. I’ve really only found a couple of posts (like this one from Nectafy) that make the claim that evergreen content is dead. Still, they say a few things that I wanted to discuss.

Generally speaking, the people who claim evergreen content is dead are in one of two camps:

1. The camp of people who don’t understand what evergreen content is.
2. The camp of people who use divisive topics to drum up engagement.

The second camp is just a marketing strategy. They often don’t actually believe what they’re saying and may even argue against it in their posts. They just use a provocative title to get people to argue in the comments or share on social media. This strategy has been on the decline since social media started to slip, and more so since Google seems to be promoting consensus over divisive discussions these days.

So, really, it’s the first group that is making these claims. “Evergreen content is dead,” they say, and I ask them: what do you think evergreen content is?

Examining the Claims

There are two interesting points that the Nectafy post I linked above brings up: one overtly and one implicitly. I wanted to talk about both of them.

Does evergreen content even really exist?

The first claim, the implicit claim, is that evergreen content doesn’t actually exist. I’ve also seen this claim on posts like this one, though that’s more of a sales pitch than a useful post in my view.

The argument is that evergreen content is content that you can write, that you post, that you let sit, and it does its work forever.

I think this problem stems from two different sources. The first is people who are very old hands at marketing, where this used to be true. When the internet was much smaller, you legitimately could write a piece of content and have it be viable for 10+ years because no one else really knew what they were doing.

The second is from people who think “evergreen” means “immortal” in this case. And that’s just not the case.

Does evergreen content exist? Yes, of course it does. That doesn’t mean it can’t fade out over time or that it doesn’t need maintenance. Evergreen is a name taken from a type of tree, and trees still die.

So the argument that evergreen content needs updates, needs refreshes, needs attention, meaning it’s not truly evergreen? That falls flat to me.

Does Google rank more recent content above older content?

One of the other claims I wanted to examine was the idea that Google prefers more recent versions of “evergreen” content over older versions. This one comes directly from the Nectafy post:

“By design, Google’s algorithms pay attention to the highest quality and the most current blogs. That’s why most blogs in positions 1-5 have been published within the last six months.”

This is an interesting claim because, as far as I know, it’s simply not true. But, as I thought about it, I realized my basis of information is fairly old. In fact, I can point to it: Ahrefs did a study of over two million keywords. Among the many different data points they analyzed, one finding was that the average age of pages in position #1 was 950 days, which is over two and a half years old. In fact, pages got younger the lower the ranking was; the average age for pages in position #10 was 650 days, nearly a year younger.

That goes directly counter to what Nectafy said, but the kicker is that Ahrefs did that study in 2017. It’s almost a decade later now, so does that information still hold up?

I don’t actually have a satisfying answer to this question. Anecdotally, older pages seem to rank better, and the very existence of the Google Sandbox seems to put a limit on how young a page can be for evergreen queries (news posts and viral content are the exception, of course.)

It’s kind of difficult to even analyze this without a Big Data source like Ahrefs. A lot of pages have started removing their publication date, replacing it with a “last updated” date, or adjusting the date each time they revise a page. And, yes, there are some more recent results high up in the SERPs, but I think there’s a good explanation for that.

“What is evergreen content?” is itself an evergreen topic, so let’s just look at that. The top results, at least as of me writing this, are:

• Digital Marketing Institute with a post from December 2024.
• Semrush with a post from April 2025.
• WordStream with a post from February 2024.
• SproutVideo with a post from January 2023.
• Wikipedia.
• MeetEdgar with a post from January 2024.
• Parse.ly with a post with no date.
• Mailchimp with a post with no date.
• BrightEdge with a post with no date, but “posted 5 years ago” up top.

As of the time of writing this, only two of those results are less than six months old. And both are ranked well, yes, but two things stand out about them.

First, the brands. Semrush is one of the top names in marketing, so anything they write is going to rank well. Digital Marketing Institute is also pretty solid and has a good chance of ranking well, too.

Second, it’s not actually that new.

For Semrush’s post, Wayback Machine shows that the URL has existed since October 2020, though back then, it was an entirely different post with a different author. In fact, the post “changed hands” to different authors at least twice and was only just recently revamped, though it’s broadly similar.

It’s mostly the same story with the DMI post, too; it traces back to June 2020, and while its content has also been overhauled, it’s still an old page.

This brings up an interesting ontological question about whether the content or the URL’s age is more important, but that’s not something I want to get into right now.

The Trick to Evergreen Content: Maintenance

All of this just brings me to my key point: evergreen content is not dead, has never been dead, and likely will never die as long as content marketing exists.

The biggest takeaway is just that evergreen content needs maintenance. Sometimes, that means updating broken links, adding newer trending keywords, or changing references to be more topical. Sometimes, it means a more thorough revamp of the content; as long as the URL is the same, there’s continuity there, and Google gives that “URL Age” some weight.

Not everything is what it seems. I think a lot of people take a look at the date Google provides for a post and assume that’s reflective of the age of a post when it could just as easily be a “last updated” date on a post many years older. Google certainly knows the “true age” of a post; they have that data from when they indexed it.

And in the meantime, don’t forget to make other kinds of content, too. Evergreen content is rarely enough to carry a whole site, after all.

Leave a Comment