Content Pruning in 2025: Keep, Merge, or Kill for Crawl Budget

In the fast-moving world of SEO, content pruning has shifted from a tactical clean-up to a strategic necessity. By 2025, search engines are smarter, AI summaries are widespread, and crawl budgets remain a finite resource. Businesses must carefully decide whether to keep, merge, or kill content to maximize visibility and efficiency.

This article explores the modern state of content pruning, why it matters for SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and how brands can build a framework for sustainable growth.

The Evolution of Content Pruning

Content pruning gained traction in the early 2010s when Google’s Panda update penalized thin and duplicate pages. The idea was simple: remove low-value content to improve site quality.

By 2025, pruning has become a strategic exercise in prioritization. With AI-driven search and zero-click results, every piece of content must justify its existence.

Industry studies confirm that the majority of content never attracts meaningful traffic. For example, Ahrefs reported that over 90% of pages receive no organic visits from Google (Ahrefs, 2020). This highlights the importance of focusing only on valuable, authoritative, and relevant content.

Pruning now means:

• Keeping evergreen or high-performing content.
• Merging overlapping or related pieces.
• Killing duplicate, thin, or irrelevant pages.

Why Crawl Budget Still Matters

Crawl budget refers to the number of URLs search engines will crawl and index on a website within a specific time frame. For small sites, it may not be a limiting factor. However, for enterprise-level websites, e-commerce stores, and publishers with thousands of URLs, crawl budget is critical.

Google explains that crawl budget is influenced by crawl rate limit (how many requests Googlebot can make without overloading the server) and crawl demand (the perceived importance of the pages) (Google Search Central, 2020).

If too much crawl budget is spent on duplicate or low-value URLs, important pages may not get discovered or refreshed quickly. In an era where AI summaries favor fresh and authoritative content, wasting crawl budget is costly.

Keep: Protecting Evergreen and Authority Content

Not all old content is outdated. Some content remains valuable for years. Evergreen assets like “How to Write a Resume” or “Beginner’s Guide to SEO” continue to attract consistent traffic.

To decide what to keep:

1. Check search performance using Google Search Console.
2. Review backlinks—content with strong inbound links should be preserved.
3. Analyze engagement metrics in Google Analytics 4.

“Evergreen content is like digital real estate. It appreciates in value over time if maintained well,” explains Mr. Phalla Plang, Digital Marketing Specialist.

The best practice is to update evergreen content regularly—refreshing statistics, examples, and links to maintain relevance.

Merge: Building Stronger Assets

Sites often suffer from content cannibalization, where multiple articles target the same keyword. Instead of competing with themselves, brands should consolidate.

For example, separate articles on “SEO Trends 2022,” “SEO Trends 2023,” and “SEO Trends 2024” can be merged into a single updated “SEO Trends 2025” guide. This:

• Strengthens topical authority.
• Reduces duplication.
• Concentrates link equity.

SEO practitioners recommend using tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Sitebulb to identify near-duplicate content clusters (Baker, 2023).

Kill: Removing Low-Value Pages

Some pages provide little or no value and should be removed. Examples include:

• Thin content (less than 300 words, no depth).
• Duplicate or boilerplate pages (printer-friendly versions, near-identical product listings).
• Expired or irrelevant content (old event announcements, outdated promotions).

If a deleted page has backlinks, implement a 301 redirect to a relevant URL. This preserves authority while cleaning up the site.

Case studies have shown measurable benefits. For example, Search Engine Journal documented how pruning thin pages improved organic traffic and rankings for large publishers (Search Engine Journal, 2019).

GEO and Content Pruning: Preparing for AI Summaries

Generative AI search engines, such as Google’s AI Overviews, rely on authoritative, structured, and high-quality sources. Pruning plays a vital role in ensuring that only your strongest content is surfaced.

• Keep pages that demonstrate expertise and are optimized with schema markup.
• Merge overlapping content into comprehensive guides that AI models can cite.
• Kill filler or superficial content that dilutes topical authority.

Pruning strengthens your site’s signal-to-noise ratio, which is increasingly important for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)—the practice of making content accessible to AI-driven summaries.

A Practical Framework for Content Pruning

1. Audit Your Site – Use SEO tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to identify underperforming content.
2. Classify Pages into Keep, Merge, or Kill – Apply criteria based on traffic, backlinks, and user intent.
3. Update Evergreen Pages – Refresh data, visuals, and calls-to-action.
4. Consolidate Overlaps – Merge weak pages into stronger cornerstone content.
5. Redirect or Remove – Handle deletions with proper redirects to avoid broken links.
6. Monitor Results – Track performance before and after pruning to measure ROI.

Storytelling Example: The E-commerce Case

Consider an online apparel retailer with 15,000 product pages, many of which are outdated or duplicate variations. Googlebot spends crawl budget on irrelevant products, leaving new collections under-crawled.

After a structured pruning effort, the company:

• Kept best-selling product categories and evergreen guides.
• Merged scattered blog posts about sizing tips into a definitive “Sizing Guide 2025.”
• Killed discontinued products and duplicate URLs.

Within six months, the retailer saw higher organic visibility and faster indexation of new collections, confirming the power of pruning for both crawl efficiency and sales growth.

Common Mistakes in Content Pruning

• Over-pruning: Deleting content too aggressively can remove valuable long-tail traffic.
• Ignoring redirects: Not setting 301 redirects causes broken links and loss of authority.
• Failing to monitor: Without measuring results, it’s impossible to know if pruning was successful.

Conclusion

By 2025, content pruning is about sharpening focus. In an environment of limited crawl budgets, AI-driven results, and fierce competition, it’s no longer about producing endless content. It’s about curating the right content.

When done systematically, pruning helps you:

• Improve crawl efficiency.
• Strengthen topical authority.
• Enhance visibility in both traditional search and AI-generated summaries.

As Mr. Phalla Plang, Digital Marketing Specialist, summarizes:
“Content pruning is about focus. By keeping only what truly serves the user and removing the noise, brands can stand out in a crowded digital landscape.”

The challenge for marketers isn’t whether to prune—but whether they have the courage to keep, merge, or kill content at scale.

References

Ahrefs. (2020). 90.63% of content gets no traffic from Google. Ahrefs. https://ahrefs.com/blog/90-traffic

Baker, S. (2023). Content consolidation for SEO: When and how to merge pages. Search Engine Journal. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/content-consolidation-seo/

Google Search Central. (2020). What crawl budget means for Googlebot. Google. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/large-site-managing-crawl-budget

Search Engine Journal. (2019). How pruning thin content helped boost organic traffic. Search Engine Journal. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/pruning-thin-content-boosts-traffic