From 1.19M to 28K: ClickUp’s SEO Collapse (And What It Teaches Us)
Chapters19
An overview of ClickUp’s SEO collapse, contrasting what went wrong with how competitors performed and highlighting a dramatic blog traffic drop. The chapter frames the case study by showing the negative outcome and the surrounding expert commentary.
ClickUp’s SEO collapse wasn’t just a one-off update failure—it was a compound failure across content quality, strategy, and technical SEO, contrasted with Zapier’s more editorial, reader-focused approach.
Summary
Edward Sturm dives into Camilla Oleksa’s in-depth analysis of ClickUp’s dramatic traffic collapse, showing that a sequence of Google updates hit the blog hard and were worsened by ClickUp’s own responses. He pieces together data from Ahrefs, Wayback, and Google’s algorithm timelines to argue that the decline was not collateral damage from a single update, but a multi-year pattern of misalignment between ClickUp’s content and search intent. Sturm places emphasis on how ClickUp’s pages over-promoted their own product, used a templated structure across thousands of posts, and neglected technical SEO signals like structured data. He contrasts ClickUp’s fate with Zapier, which pursued a broader, editorially balanced strategy and stabilized after declines. The episode also highlights how AI-driven content cannibalized informational queries, yet does not fully explain the loss in core commercial keywords. By the end, Sturm presents a practical takeaway: content strategy must match search intent and maintain editorial quality at scale, rather than defaulting to mass-promotional templates. The episode closes with an invitation to Camilla Oleksa’s analysis and a plug for Sturm’s Compact Keywords course, positioned as a safer path to SEO aligned with Google's expectations.
Key Takeaways
- ClickUp’s blog traffic fell 97.6% from 1.19 million to 28,790 visits per month over 15 months, per Camilla Oleksa’s dataset analyzed by Edward Sturm.
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Who Is This For?
Essential viewing for SEO professionals and content strategists at SaaS companies who want to understand how mass templating and misaligned optimization can destroy organic traffic—and what a more editorial, intent-driven approach (as seen with Zapier) looks like.
Notable Quotes
"The March 2024 scaled content abuse policies... the blog played into ClickUp’s playbook."
—Reference to Google’s early updates that began the quality signals ClickUp’s blog couldn’t meet.
"The blog not only declined; most pages were almost removed from Google's traffic allocation, while the domain metrics held up."
—Highlights the divergence between on-domain vs. page-level performance.
"ClickUp’s biggest single traffic loss was their ChatGPT alternatives article... from over 100,000 monthly visits to just 434."
—A concrete example of core keyword loss and how a single page collapsed.
"The root cause was not topical overreach. It was multiple compounding failures across content strategy, execution, and technical SEO."
—Summarizes the author’s final hypothesis and contrast with Zapier’s approach.
Questions This Video Answers
- Why did ClickUp’s blog traffic decline so dramatically after 2024 despite increasing backlinks?
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ClickUp SEO case studyGoogle EEAT and core updatesChatGPT alternatives page analysisTechnical SEO and structured dataWayback Machine and Ahrefs data usageZapier vs ClickUp editorial strategyAI content impact on SEO
Full Transcript
If you want to learn what not to do in SEO, there are few better case studies than the project management and productivity platform ClickUp. And if you want to know what to do, look at what ClickUp's competitors did instead. How ClickUp's blog lost 97.6% of its traffic in 15 months. That's what we are sharing on this episode of the show. Listen to this. In January 2025, ClickUp's blog was bringing 1.19 million organic visitors per month. Today in April 2026, that number is 28,790. That is a 97.6% decline in 15 months, not the 50% drop that has been widely reported, and it is still falling.
So, this is in response to Ryan Robinson, who published his ClickUp marketing review in January 2026. When he published that, the blog was at roughly 127,000 monthly visits. This article says, "His analysis was solid, but it captured a snapshot of a problem that has since gotten four times worse." On LinkedIn, SEO consultants pointed to topical overreach and said Google was punishing ClickUp for ranking outside their lane. Both of those explanations seemed incomplete, so I looked at the data. And by the way, this is from Kamila Oleksa. Thank you to Kamila for this write-up. It's crazy write-up.
So, she looked at the data. I pulled ClickUp's search history from Ahrefs, crawled their site maps from December 2024 through today, mapped every Google algorithm update against their traffic timeline, pulled archived versions of their top pages from Wayback Machine, and reverse-engineered their response to the crash. What I found, ClickUp's blog was not collateral damage from a single update. It was hit by multiple consecutive Google updates across two years, and ClickUp's response to each hit made the next one worse. For context, in March 2024, Google introduced new spam policies explicitly targeting quote-unquote scaled content abuse, content produced at scale primarily to manipulate rankings, and content that quote-unquote feels like it was made to attract clicks.
That is quite literally ClickUp's blog playbook. Two more core updates followed in August and November 2024, each emphasizing EEAT and content quality. EEAT and content quality. By the time ClickUp's blog peaked in January 2025, Google had already been tightening the criteria for over a year. And Camilla breaks down ClickUp's blog traffic month by month with every confirmed Google update mapped against it. She says, "The full timeline reveals something the 2025 only view hides. ClickUp's blog actually survived the 2024 updates and grew through them, peaking at 1.19 million in January 2025. The March 2024 scaled content abuse policies, the June 2024 spam update, then the August 2024 core update all hit, and the blog recovered and grew each time.
It was the March 2025 core update that finally broke it, and every update since has compounded the damage." Now, some of this decline is partly explained by AI tools like ChatGPT cannibalizing informational queries. People who once Googled "out of office message examples" or "itinerary template" now ask ChatGPT directly. That traffic reduction would have happened regardless of content quality, but the loss of rankings for core commercial keywords like task management software and free project management software is a different problem. People still search those terms, other sites still rank for them, and ClickUp lost both the traffic and the rankings.
It is the ranking loss that this investigation focuses on. There was exactly one month of recovery after March 2025, and that was July 2025, when traffic ticked up 11% between the June core update completing and the August spam update beginning. That window lasted 4 weeks, and I remember that June core update boosting a lot of spam sites last year. I personally remember that. AI Invest, which I report on all the time on this show, was actually one of those. It went from 275,000 clicks a month in under 2 months to 9.5 million clicks a month because of the June core update last year.
And then the August spam update hit, and they're down to way, way, way less than when they started with. So, this article continues, "ClickUp's blog did not just decline. Most of its pages were almost removed from Google's traffic allocation, while the rest of the domain held relatively steady. The full domain went from 2. 73 million to 1.15 million. That is a 57.8% decline, which is meaningful, but far less severe than the blog's 97.6% traffic reduction. Non-blog pages went from roughly 1.54 million to 1.12 million over the same period, a 27% decline. The blog went from being nearly half of ClickUp's organic traffic to contributing 2.5% of it.
That's crazy. Google did not punish the ClickUp brand. It punished the ClickUp blog specifically. This pattern is consistent with a helpful content classifier being applied at the content type or section level. Google's helpful content system, which was folded into core updates starting March 2024, evaluates whether a single portion of a site's content is unhelpful. The signal is site-wide in theory, but in practice, when one section of a domain produces overwhelmingly different content from the rest, the effect concentrates there. During the exact period that ClickUp's blog lost 97.6% of its traffic, their domain metrics actually went up.
ClickUp's domain got stronger. Their domain rating increased. Their blog got more backlinks. Traffic still cratered. This eliminates backlinks as a root cause. The blog's referring domains grew by 28% between January 2025 and January 2026, the exact period when traffic fell from 1.19 million to 127,000. Some of that growth was spam as the page-level analysis later shows, the same Telegram spam network targets both ClickUp and Zapier's competing article, yet Zapier ranks number two. Backlinks, clean or dirty, do not explain the divergence. ClickUp also appears to be investing in legitimate backlink outreach as part of their recovery strategy.
And the author says recently contacted by a link builder for a collaboration. This is a reasonable tactic in general, but for this specific problem, it is treating a symptom that does not exist. Relevant content And now this this part I thought was really interesting because a topical overreach theory seemed very plausible about what happened to ClickUp, but this next section is relevant content does not explain what happened. So, the dominant narrative on LinkedIn and in SEO commentary is that ClickUp ranked for too many off-topic keywords and Google punished them for straying outside their core relevance.
That explanation is partially true. ClickUp absolutely ranked for keywords that have nothing to do with project management and are on the edge of work-related topics, but it does not explain the full picture because ClickUp's own core topic keywords died just as hard. Task management software is ClickUp's exact product category. It went to a Free project management software is the number one commercial keyword for their market. Their share of it went to one visit per month. Project management tools is their direct competitive comparison query. It went to one visit per month. Meeting agenda, SOP templates, and content calendar templates are all legitimate workflow and productivity topics that fall squarely within ClickUp's product scope.
All of them got destroyed, not reduced, destroyed. The off-topic content dying, motivational quotes, WhatsApp status ideas, resume templates, travel itineraries, was expected, but the core topic content dying alongside it is what matters. ClickUp's biggest single traffic loss was their ChatGPT alternatives article within their blog, which went from over 100,000 monthly visits to just 434. I pulled every major version from Wayback Machine and the full Ahrefs history for this specific URL to understand exactly what happened. The page's first crash, which was mid-2024, from 27,000 down to 3.4 thousand, lines up with the June 2024 spam update and August 2024 core update.
It then fully recovered through the November and December 2024 core updates, reaching an all-time high of 112,000 by February 2025. The March 2025 core update killed it permanently. By April 2026, it is at 446 visits. The keyword data confirms the number of keywords this page ranked in the top three for went from 431 to 11, then rocketed back to 656 before collapsing to 149. So, this was April 24, get gets hit at September 2024, it's down to 11. January 2025 goes back to 656, and then collapses April 2026 to 149. This was written, by the way, in April this year.
During the entire period, this page's URL rating stayed between 12 and 15. It actually peaked at 15 right as traffic was collapsing. The page had 180 live referring domains and 395 live backlinks. Links did not cause the first crash, nor the second one. There's this next section, six versions, one URL, the content evolution. It's how the page evolved, and it's really interesting how they kept changing the page and making it worse and and and hurting themselves more. So, the first thing to look at is an author swap for this article. The author swap and restructure happened together in December 2024 with version five, when the page went from Alex York's 15-tool version to Manase Nair's 20-tool version.
This version actually worked. Traffic recovered from 3.4 thousand to The new author and expanded list were not the problem. The problem was what came after. Each subsequent version made the page more promotional, and the page kept falling from 107 thousand to 446 through 2026. The backlink profile is not a factor. I also pulled the referring domains for this URL. A significant portion is spam from a Telegram link selling network sending 100-plus links across 10 domains with anchor text advertising the service. However, when I checked Zapier's ChatGPT alternatives page, which ranks number one, I found the exact same spam network targeting it with even more variants.
Both pages get backlinks from the same junk. This is what the pages look like. I fetched and analyzed six of the biggest losers. The patterns are identical across all of them, regardless of whether the topic is on-brand or off-topic. Every single listicle on the blog positions ClickUp as a top recommendation even when it makes no sense when looking at the positioning or verticals of the tools in question. The ChatGPT Alternatives page even acknowledges that ClickUp uses ChatGPT under the hood. Their number one ChatGPT alternative is a wrapper that runs on ChatGPT. Also, the ClickUp section is always four to seven times longer than competitors.
The ClickUp section on the free project management software page is 2,500 words. That is longer than many standalone blog posts. It includes multiple subsections, embedded videos, product screenshots, a pricing table, a workflow walk-through, and links to related ClickUp pages. A competitor gets 300 words and a screenshot. What? Every page averages one promotional element per 250 to 400 words. Cry, ClickUp brain free. Get started. Download ClickUp brain max. Pricing tables, product screenshots, embedded videos, all before the reader gets the information they came for. Even the off-topic pages, like WhatsApp quotes, motivational quotes, travel templates, carry eight to 15 ClickUp promotional blocks each.
Every tool in every listicle follows this exact skeleton, repeated identically across 7,000 plus pages. This structure is applied identically across 7,000 plus pages. ClickUp's limitations are always two vague sentences. Competitors get specific, actionable criticisms without any sources. The technical SEO reflects this, too. Using a dynamic year variable in titles is common and fine, but ClickUp's implementation is broken. The HTML renders 2026 correctly, while the JSON schema contains a literal year in three places. It's literally just year in brackets in three places. The article headline, the webpage name, and the breadcrumb list. Google's structured data parser reads the schema directly and sees just year as the literal text instead of 2026.
Compare this to Zapier's schema for the same keyword. Clean headline matching the H1, a relevant static image, no unresolved variables. And this is so funny. Okay, so what ClickUp did in response? To understand why the decline kept accelerating instead of leveling off, I need to look at what ClickUp did during the crash. I compared ClickUp's blog sitemap from three points in time. While their blog was losing 97.6% of its traffic, ClickUp added 2,815 new posts. That is a 67% increase in total blog content in 16 months. And they removed only 42 URLs. Of those 42, 36 were redirected to consolidated versions, and six were moved to a new software teams and resources section.
Only five posts were truly deleted. The content they added falls into predictable categories, like AI-related or template-related or how-to guides. The AI content, which is 608 posts, was strategically relevant. ClickUp was pivoting to the AI productivity space, so writing about AI tools and AI agents aligned with the product direction. But the execution was the same promotional template used everywhere else. 77 AI agents for use case pages follow an identical programmatic structure. 249 competitor alternatives listicles all rank ClickUp number one. 551 template posts all funnel to ClickUp sign-ups. The strategy was defensible. The execution was not.
Publishing 2,815 new posts using the same template that triggered the quality signal in the first place did not dilute the problem. There's a bit about paid traffic. Ahrefs data shows ClickUp ran recurring paid campaigns to blog content through 2024 and 2025 with periodic spikes. However, paid activity gradually tapered off through late 2025 and into 2026, declining alongside the organic traffic rather than compensating for it. ClickUp's blog currently ranks for approximately 22,000 keywords, down from what Ahrefs estimates was well over 100,000 at peak. The blog that once drove 1.19 million organic visitors per month now survives on generic software tutorials, how to make an Excel spreadsheet, Google Sheets formulas, Google Docs search, competitor brand terms, monday.com login, Notion login, Rask AI alternatives, its own brand queries, and work-related content.
WhatsApp quotes, Zoom memes, HR jokes, motivational quotes. Their top 1,734 visits for how to create a spreadsheet in Excel. Not a single one of their remaining top keywords is a high-intent product search in their own category. Task management software, product management tools, team collaboration software, all of their core commercial queries are gone. But, their traffic went to competitors, not to zero. So, one objection to this analysis is that the traffic decline could be caused by AI overviews and ChatGPT cannibalizing informational queries. If nobody searches for task management software anymore, ClickUp losing that traffic would not be a quality problem.
But, people are still searching and other sites are getting that traffic. I pulled the current SERPs for ClickUp's former top keywords. Here is who ranks now. It's Trello, it's Microsoft, it's Todoist, it's Reddit, it's Zapier. ClickUp is nowhere in the top 10 for their own product verticals. The traffic was redistributed to competitors, independent review sites, and Reddit not completely destroyed by AI overviews. The sites that replaced ClickUp in the ChatGPT alternative SERP show a pattern. Zapier has the most call to actions on this list and still ranks number two. The difference is not how much you promote, it is whether the promotion degrades the content.
Zapier's self-listings get the same editorial treatment as every other tool. ClickUp gives itself 4.3 times more space than competitors and pads the list to 20 tools to justify the placement. Domain authority does not override this. ClickUp's domain rating of 90 is outranked by a domain rating 46 site and a domain rating 58 site. Now, Zapier is a very interesting example. This is what actually to do if you want to do this more properly. Zapier runs the same model as ClickUp, a SaaS company with a massive blog that covers topics well beyond its core product, which is workflow automation.
Their blog writes about AI tools, productivity apps, project management, CRM, and dozens of other categories. They have been doing this for years at scale. Here is how the three largest SaaS blogs in this space performed from their respective peaks to April 2026. HubSpot lost 95.5% of its traffic. ClickUp lost 97.6% of its traffic. Zapier only lost 53% of its traffic. HubSpot followed the same playbook. Cover letter examples, sales quotes, resume templates, template-heavy self-promotion. Their decline has been widely reported and follows the same trajectory. Zapier also declined from its peak, but the trajectory is completely different.
9.8 million to 4.6 million is a real decline, likely driven partly by AI overviews eating informational queries across the board, but Zapier stabilized at 4.6 million, still one of the largest SaaS blogs on the internet. ClickUp's blog gets fewer monthly visits than many personal blogs. I took a look at Zapier's editorial comparing the two ChatGPT alternatives articles side-by-side. Zapier lists eight tools that are all genuine ChatGPT alternatives, actual AI chatbots you would use instead of ChatGPT. ClickUp pads to 20 by including tools that are not ChatGPT alternatives in any real sense. Semrush Content Shake AI, which is an SEO tool.
Surfer AI, an SEO tool. Socratic engineering management, Elicit academic research, Character.AI roleplay, Undetectable.AI AI detection evasion. If you search ChatGPT alternatives, you are not looking for an SEO content optimizer or an AI detection bypass tool. Zapier includes Grok, one of the most discussed AI chatbots. ClickUp does not list it. ClickUp still lists Amazon Code Whisper, which was rebranded to Amazon Q Developer. It lists OpenAI Playground as a ChatGPT alternative, which is ChatGPT's own API testing tool. Zapier gives genuine editorial opinions, like, "I find it very funny that Grok is on this list." Or, "Claude tends to respond more empathetically." Or, "Meta AI is far short of the other apps on this list." ClickUp gives templated descriptions with no editorial voice.
Zapier's criteria is editorial. Do something better than ChatGPT, be easy to use, work reliably. ClickUp's is a generic checklist: natural language processing, auto completion, plugins. Zapier links to dedicated comparison articles after each tool: Claude versus ChatGPT, Gemini versus ChatGPT, giving readers a natural next step. ClickUp links to more ClickUp listicles. Check out these Claude AI alternatives, which are themselves ClickUp number one promotional pages. Zapier closes with, "Give a few of them a go and find out." and links to related reading. ClickUp closes with sign up for a free ClickUp account here. Zapier runs paid ads on ChatGPT alternatives despite ranking number two organically, likely to defend the position from competitors and maintain visibility above AI overviews.
This comparison narrows the cause. All SaaS blogs are declining equally. No, Zapier lost 53% ClickUp lost 97.6% The severity is not comparable. Okay, Google is punishing blogs that write beyond their core topic. No, Zapier writes about everything from AI chatbots to email marketing and still ranks number two for ChatGPT alternatives. I know that some people would would say that cuz I was thinking this too, that Zapier has email functionality. It has a lot of AI within its functionality, but I agree that it is not just topical overreach. And then the last one is AI overviews killed all informational traffic.
Partially true for everyone, but it does not explain why ClickUp lost rankings for commercial queries like task management software where other sites still get traffic. The variable is not what topics you cover, it is how you cover them. And so this last part, this is the author's five-cent hypothesis of what happened. The root cause was not topical overreach. It was multiple compounding failures across content strategy, execution, and technical SEO. The content never matched search intent. When someone searches ChatGPT alternatives, they want a curated list of genuine alternatives with honest assessments. Zapier runs around 10 call to actions and list itself at number three and number seven, but the editorial treats its own products the same way it treats competitors.
ClickUp treated the query as a keyword to capture. 20 tools mixing up use cases, ClickUp at number one with 4.3 times more space, 14 plus call to actions. The page was optimized for ClickUp's conversion funnel, not for the searcher's question. The mismatch is quite possibly replicated across 7,000 plus pages. The technical SEO was neglected. Broken schema with unresolved year template variables and unsourced claims about competitors. These are individually small issues, but at scale across thousands of pages, they compound into a pattern of low quality optimization. And lastly, every response made it worse. The March 2025 hit took them to 492,000.
From there, they published 2,815 more templated posts instead of pruning. They made top pages more promotional instead of less. 15 months of doubling down took them from 492,000 to 29,000. And that is this entire article. How ClickUp's blog lost 97.6% of its traffic in 15 months by Camilla Oleksa. Thank you, Camilla, for that. I will add that there was probably a lot of pogo sticking that was not at a tolerable scale. A machine-detectable bad editorial fingerprint. ClickUp basically industrialized these bad user experience signals across thousands of URLs. Pogo sticking happening across the board because intent, like Camilla says, was not being addressed.
That's going to hurt any website. And Zapier, from what Camilla wrote, did a way better job of satisfying search intent. And then, ClickUp basically did this bad pattern in mass. Man, crazy, crazy case study. This will be linked to in the description of this episode. If you want to learn how to do SEO the safe way that targets literally customers, users, warm leads, I spent a year making my SEO course, Compact Keywords, about this. It is how to do SEO that is in line with what Google wants because you are giving searchers what they want.
You are targeting searchers who are looking to take action. And you are saying your brand is the brand to take action with. They're looking for your brand. They just don't know your brand exists. The course is getting amazing testimonials. You can check it all out at compactkeywords.com, and that is everything that I got for you on this episode of the show. This is episode 1,038 of the Edward show, 1,038 days in a row doing this podcast. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple podcasts, thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you again tomorrow.
Bye now.
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