Evergreen content is content that keeps getting visits months or years after it's published, because it answers a question people always ask. Viral content goes the other way: it gathers huge attention in a few days around a specific moment, then fades and almost never comes back.
The difference is easier to see in numbers than in definitions. Labubu, Pop Mart's collectible plush toy, had 1,220,000 monthly searches in the UK in September 2025 according to Google Ads. By August 2026 it had 74,000, 94% fewer. Over the same period a dull search like "how to write a cv" went from 12,100 to 8,100 a month: down by a third, but still there, and back to 12,100 in January as it is every year.
Further down you'll find a table with the curves of four UK searches, two viral and two evergreen, measured week by week on Google Trends. First, though, it's worth separating the categories properly, because there are three of them, not two.
Evergreen, viral, seasonal: three different curves
People who plan content usually think in pairs, evergreen versus viral. The calendar adds a third shape, the seasonal one, which has huge but predictable peaks and behaves very differently from a trend.
An example makes the point. "Self assessment tax return" had 49,500 searches in September 2025 and 246,000 in January 2026 (Google Ads, United Kingdom): five times as many in four months, in the run-up to the 31 January online filing deadline. It looks like a viral spike, but it comes back every year in the same weeks, so the page that catches it is prepared in advance and updated, not rewritten from scratch.
| Evergreen | Viral | Seasonal | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shape of demand | Steady, with fluctuations | Sudden spike, then collapse | High peak that repeats every year |
| How long the traffic lasts | Years, if the page is maintained | Days or weeks | A few weeks, every year |
| Typical channel | Organic search, AI answers | Social media, news, word of mouth | Organic search, news |
| Can it be planned? | Yes | No | Yes, months ahead |
| Maintenance | Periodic review of data and examples | None, it runs out | Update before every peak |
| UK example | how to write a cv | tralalero tralala, labubu | self assessment tax return |
The row that matters most is the planning one: who can plan what. Evergreen and seasonal content go in the calendar months ahead. Viral content doesn't, and the section on virality explains why.
How long a viral spike lasts: the Google Trends UK data
To measure it, we pulled the weekly UK series for four searches from Google Trends, from October 2024 to September 2026. Two came from viral phenomena: "tralalero tralala", the Italian brainrot meme that peaked in the UK at the turn of April and May 2025, and "labubu". Two are everyday questions: "how to write a cv" and "how to calculate percentage".
Google Trends returns an index from 0 to 100, where 100 is the week with the most interest in the chosen period. Each series is normalised to its own maximum, so the table compares the shape of the curves, not the volumes. For volumes there's the last column, taken from Google Ads.
| Search | Type | Peak week | Weeks to halve | Index 21-27 Sep 2025 | Index 20-26 Sep 2026 | Change over a year | Searches in August 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| tralalero tralala | Viral | 27 Apr-3 May 2025 | 3 | 19 | 0 | -100% | 8,100 |
| labubu | Viral | 29 Jun-5 Jul 2025 | 8 | 30 | 2 | -93% | 74,000 |
| how to write a cv | Evergreen | 6-12 Oct 2024 | Only in scattered weeks | 92 | 59 | -36% | 8,100 |
| how to calculate percentage | Evergreen | 19-25 Jan 2025 | Only in school holidays | 76 | 43 | -43% | 6,600 |
The two viral searches lost half their interest in three weeks (tralalero tralala) and in eight (labubu, which in the UK had a long summer plateau before falling). Six months after the peak the index was at 16 for the meme and 11 for the toy. Today the meme is at 0 and the toy at 2: practically gone.
"How to write a cv" went below half its maximum only in scattered weeks until the end of 2025, with a low of 19 in Christmas week. Since January 2026, though, it has hovered around 50, and year on year it's down 36%. The demand hasn't gone: it was 8,100 searches in August 2026, and January 2026 brought it back to 12,100.
"How to calculate percentage" is the most interesting case, because it disproves the idea that evergreen means eternal. The curve follows the school calendar: it drops below half in the summer holidays, at Christmas and in half-term weeks, and comes back when term starts. The question is still asked, 14,800 times a month on average, but year on year the index is down 43%, and the summer 2026 low (19) is well below the summer 2025 one (34). From these data we can't say how much is down to calculators built into the results and AI-generated answers. We can say that an evergreen topic can shrink, and that it needs checking. In the UK both of our evergreen searches shrank; when we ran the same test on Italian searches on 1 October 2026, the CV one was stable (-2%) and the percentage one fell by 41%.
Why virality can't be put in the calendar
The trouble with viral content is that it's extremely rare, even when you do everything right. The largest study on the subject is by Sharad Goel, Ashton Anderson, Jake Hofman and Duncan Watts, published in Management Science in 2016. They analysed around a billion diffusion events on Twitter between July 2011 and June 2012.
Only 0.025% of sharing cascades reached 100 people, roughly one in 4,000. Truly viral hits appeared, the authors write, at a rate "closer to one in a million". Most content stopped with the person who posted it and their direct contacts.
You can raise the odds, that much is true. Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman, in a 2012 study in the Journal of Marketing Research, analysed every New York Times article published over three months. The most shared were those that triggered high-arousal emotions such as awe, anger and anxiety. Sadness, by contrast, reduced sharing. Practical usefulness helped too.
Two consequences follow for a business. The first is that virality remains a gamble: you can build a piece with all the right ingredients and watch it stop at a hundred views. The second is that anger and anxiety are rarely the emotions a B2B company wants attached to its name. There's also a third, more practical point: a spike on TikTok or Instagram often doesn't reach the website, as we explain in our article on social media and SEO.
Why evergreen content pays off more over time
HubSpot coined the term compounding posts for articles whose traffic grows instead of declining. They're about 10% of posts, generate 38% of the blog's traffic and each one brings in as much as six ordinary articles. On HubSpot's blog, 14% of posts were still growing twelve months after publication. The analysis was last updated in June 2025 and has no published UK equivalent.
The growth arrives late because Google rewards pages that stick around. According to an Ahrefs study of 1.3 million US keywords, published in May 2025 and updated in August 2026, the page in first position is 5 years old on average. 72.9% of top 10 pages are more than three years old, and only 1.74% of recently published pages make the top 10 within twelve months. Viral content doesn't stay around long enough to build up that advantage.
Be careful not to read the word evergreen as a guarantee, though. Ahrefs again, in research on around 14 billion pages, found that 96.55% get no clicks at all from Google. There are three main causes: nobody searches for the topic, the page has no links, or the format doesn't match what the user wants. Evergreen content only works if it starts from keyword research based on real volumes and from search intent read on the results page.
An example from one of our projects in Italy shows how it works over time. For Macropix, a Milan-based maker of custom LED screens, the site was in position 88 for the query "monitor pubblicitario" (advertising monitor) in 2020 and in position 2 in 2025. Over seven years the project, combining SEO and advertising, generated around seven thousand contact requests, and today the site holds more than a hundred keywords in Google Italy's top three positions. The full case is in our article on SEO for manufacturing.
Evergreen doesn't mean static: what AI answers change
Until a few years ago a piece of evergreen content could stay untouched for a long time. With AI-generated answers the date matters more, at least for some platforms.
Seer Interactive, a US agency, analysed more than 5,000 URLs cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews in June 2025. According to Seer's study, about 85% of AI Overview citations came from content published between 2023 and 2025, with 44% from 2025 alone. For ChatGPT the share was 71%, for Perplexity about 80%, with half of the citations from 2025.
In July 2025 Ahrefs measured the age of almost 17 million cited URLs. Content cited by AI assistants was 1,064 days old on average, against 1,432 days for Google's organic results: 25.7% fresher. The top three AI Overview citations, however, averaged more than 1,432 days, in line with organic results. The two studies disagree on AI Overviews and agree on ChatGPT and Perplexity, which prefer recent content.
The practical consequence is that evergreen content has to be maintained, and changing the date isn't enough. Google, in its documentation on dates, asks that the date shown indicates when the page was published or significantly updated. Updating means changing data, examples and passages that no longer hold. When an article can't be saved any more, the right choice is often content pruning. On the relationship between AI and organic traffic there's a dedicated guide to AI Overviews.
How to tell whether a topic is evergreen before you write it
Five checks we run before putting a topic in the editorial plan:
- Open Google Trends for the United Kingdom with a five-year range. If the curve has a single peak and then collapses, it's a trend. If it hovers around a stable level, or repeats every year, it's evergreen or seasonal. How to read those numbers properly is explained in our article on Google Trends.
- Look at monthly volumes over twelve months in the Google Ads Keyword Planner. Evergreen searches fluctuate a lot too: "how to write a cv" went from 12,100 searches in September 2025 to 8,100 in August 2026, but the cycle repeats every year, with a high in January. What matters is that the curve isn't heading towards zero, like labubu's.
- Ask yourself whether the answer will change within two years. Prices, regulations, software versions and tax rates change: the topic stays evergreen, but the page will need updating on a set schedule.
- Check the age of the pages on the first page of results. If there are articles from three or four years ago still there, the demand is stable. If there's only news from this week, you're looking at a trend.
- Take dates out of titles and URLs. A slug with the year in it makes a page you've just updated look old.
There's a distinction almost every guide mentions and few apply: an evergreen topic doesn't automatically produce evergreen content. Tax is a topic that never goes away; the page "income tax rates 2026/27" expires on 5 April 2027.
When it makes sense to chase a trend
Chasing a trend makes sense when the goal is to get noticed quickly: growing social profiles, brand awareness, digital PR campaigns looking for press coverage. In those cases the spike is the result you want, and the drop afterwards is expected.
For organic traffic another move works better: use the trend as a way in to a page that lasts. A toy shop that published "where to buy genuine Labubu" in summer 2025 would today have a page tied to a search that has fallen to 2% of its peak. A guide on how to spot a counterfeit collectible, opening with Labubu as the example, would have caught part of the same spike and would still be useful today for other products.
How much evergreen and how much trend in the editorial plan
The ratios that go round online, 70/30 or 80/20, don't come from any study we've been able to find: they're conventions repeated from one article to the next. The right share depends on what the content has to do. This is the guideline we use with clients when we build a content marketing plan:
| Goal | Evergreen share | Trend share | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leads from organic search (B2B, services, industry) | Almost all | Only as a PR hook | Pages have to work for years and build up rankings |
| Awareness on social media | The website's foundation | Most of it | The spike is the result you're after |
| Publishing and news | A stable portion | Most of it | Evergreen pieces hold traffic between one spike and the next |
| E-commerce | Most of it | Planned seasonal content more than trends | Sales, holidays and seasons are predictable |
For a business that sells services or technical products and wants leads from organic search, the trend column stays almost empty. That's the work we do in SEO consultancy projects: building an archive of pages that bring in enquiries for years, and using trends only when there's a specific reason.
How to measure whether content is really evergreen
The simplest test is done in Google Search Console. Take the clicks for the third month after publication and compare them with the twelfth. If the twelfth month is equal to or higher than the third, the page behaves like a compounding post. If it has collapsed, it was trend content even if it didn't look like it.
Two signals to read together. Stable impressions with falling clicks usually mean the answer is being read directly on the results page, in AI Overviews or snippets: that's the zero-click search effect. Impressions and clicks falling together mean instead that demand is shrinking or someone has overtaken you, and our article on traffic drops explains how to find the cause, step by step.
For every piece of evergreen content it's worth setting a review date, usually every six to twelve months for topics that move and once a year for the rest. On a company blog this work is easier to organise if the archive is already structured by topic, as we explain in our guide to blog SEO.
Something the industry rarely says: AI answers are doing to generic evergreen content what time does to viral content. A definition or a calculation is now read directly in the answer, and the page that contained it loses clicks even if it stays first. In 2026 the part of a piece of content that stays truly evergreen is the part a model can't generate on its own: the data you collected, the cases you worked on, the table you built. The Google Trends table above will need redoing in a year, and that's why this page will still have something to say.
Frequently asked questions
In marketing it describes content that stays useful and searched for months or years after publication, because it answers a question people always ask, such as a practical guide or the explanation of a concept.
Viral content gathers a lot of attention in a few days and then fades: in UK Google Trends data, tralalero tralala and labubu lost half their interest in three and eight weeks. Evergreen content has lower but steady demand, which can last for years.
It depends on how you treat it. It peaks every year at the same time, like self assessment tax return in January, so the page stays valid if you update it before every peak. If you rewrite it from scratch every year on a new URL, you lose the history it has built up.
It depends on the topic. For subjects that change often, such as prices, regulations or tools, a review every six to twelve months. For stable concepts once a year is enough. The update has to change data and examples, not just the date.
Rarely in a direct way, because the traffic comes almost entirely from social media and news and runs out in a few weeks. It can help if it brings links from authoritative sites to a page that stays useful after the spike.
Practical guides, step-by-step tutorials, glossaries, checklists, tool comparisons and case studies with data. They stay evergreen as long as the information in them is correct, which is why they need rechecking.
