Most content teams have a few hundred posts and no idea which ones earn anything. This audit takes an afternoon and produces a decision for every URL.
Pull three numbers per post
Organic sessions over the last twelve months, from Search Console or GA4. Conversions attributed to the post, using whatever definition you already trust. Last meaningful update date, not the date a plugin touched it.
Then add one judgement column: could a language model have produced this from public sources? Yes or no. Be honest. Most teams find eighty percent or more are yes.
The four actions
Keep and leave alone: traffic is decent, conversions exist, model could not have written it. Do nothing. These are working.
Update: real traffic but stale, or good topic executed thinly. Worth investment, especially if you can add something a model cannot copy, like your own numbers or a tool.
Consolidate: multiple posts on near-identical topics splitting the same search intent between them. Merge into one, redirect the rest. Common on any site that has run for more than two years.
Kill: no traffic, no conversions, model could have written it. Delete and return a 410, or redirect if a successor exists. Deleting content feels wrong and is usually correct. A large tail of dead pages does nothing for you.
The number people resist
On a typical Indian B2B blog running three years, the split lands near ten percent keep, twenty percent update, twenty percent consolidate, fifty percent kill. That last figure is the one that causes arguments, because someone commissioned every one of those posts.
The argument to have is not whether the posts were a mistake. It is whether keeping them costs anything. It does: crawl budget, internal link dilution, and the time you spend maintaining pages nobody reads.
Run it quarterly
An audit done once is an event. Done every quarter it becomes the thing that stops the archive rotting, and it takes about an hour once the spreadsheet exists.