How to Identify and Fix Graveyard Keywords in SEO

What a Graveyard Keyword Looks Like

The GSC data pattern is distinctive once you know what to look for:

```

Keyword: "how long does it take to index a new website"

Impressions (Q1 2025): 4,200/month CTR (Q1 2025): 3.8% Avg position: 2.1

Impressions (Q1 2026): 5,600/month ← up 33% CTR (Q1 2026): 0.9% ← down 76% Avg position: 2.0 ← roughly flat ```

Impressions up. Clicks down. Position unchanged.

What changed: Google rolled out an AI Overview for this query in mid-2025. The AI Overview answers the question in full. The user gets what they need without scrolling. Your result at position 2 now competes with an AI answer above position 1.

Position 2 used to mean 8–12% CTR for informational queries. Now it means 0.9%.

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The Audit: 847 Queries Across 6 Sites

We ran a graveyard keyword audit across 6 client sites with combined GSC data going back 24 months. We defined a graveyard keyword as:

• Minimum 500 impressions/month (to filter noise)
• CTR declining more than 50% year-over-year
• Average position held or improved during the same period
• AI Overview confirmed present for that query (manual verification)

847 queries met all four criteria. That's across 6 sites, but even on a single site the smallest graveyard keyword pool we found was 94 queries.

``` Site type | Graveyard keywords | % of total tracked keywords

• ----------------------|--------------------|----------------------------

B2B SaaS (informational blog) | 214 | 31% Marketing agency blog | 187 | 28% E-commerce category pages | 91 | 12% Local service (info content) | 156 | 41% Healthcare informational | 199 | 44% Legal informational | 0 | 0% ```

Legal informational had zero graveyard keywords. Not because AI doesn't answer legal questions — it does. But because legal queries trigger AI Overviews far less consistently due to the "Your Money or Your Life" sensitivity guidelines Google applies. Healthcare had the highest graveyard keyword rate: 44% of tracked informational keywords.

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What We Found

Finding 1 — AI Overviews Appear on 94% of Graveyard Keywords

We manually verified AI Overview presence for a sample of 300 keywords from the 847. 94% had an AI Overview present. The remaining 6% had featured snippets that occupied enough space to suppress click intent.

No AI Overview. No graveyard. The correlation is that tight.

This means graveyard keyword detection is predictable: if you can identify which of your ranking queries have AI Overviews, you've found most of your graveyard keywords before the CTR data even shows the damage.

Finding 2 — The CTR Floor Is Around 0.8% for AI Overview Queries

Across our dataset, the lowest sustained CTR we saw for queries with AI Overviews was around 0.8%. Queries without AI Overviews at the same positions averaged 4.2–7.6% CTR depending on intent.

The floor matters because it tells you the maximum traffic value of a position-1 graveyard keyword:

``` 500 impressions/month × 0.8% CTR = 4 clicks/month ```

Compare that to a position-5 keyword without an AI Overview:

``` 500 impressions/month × 4.5% CTR = 22.5 clicks/month ```

You're generating 5.6x more traffic from a lower-ranked, non-AI-Overview keyword. The traffic value calculation for SEO has fundamentally changed, and most keyword prioritization frameworks haven't caught up.

Finding 3 — Graveyard Keywords Cluster Around 5 Topic Types

The queries flagged as graveyard keywords weren't random. They clustered in predictable categories:

1. "How long does it take to..." — Duration questions. AI answers them precisely.
2. "What is [definition]" — Definitional queries. AI is authoritative on definitions.
3. "How to [step-by-step task]" — Process queries. AI Overviews summarize processes cleanly.
4. "Is [X] good/bad/safe/legal" — Binary evaluation queries. AI takes a position.
5. "[Number] tips/steps/ways to..." — List queries. AI formats them natively.

These five types account for 79% of the graveyard keywords in our dataset. If your content strategy has been built primarily around these formats — which most informational content strategies have been — you have significant AI Overview exposure.

The queries that are NOT graveyard candidates: data-dense original research, case studies, and opinion-driven analysis. Google's AI Overview doesn't reproduce original data it can't source or editorial positions with nuance. Those query types are still worth creating.

For more on which content types survive AI competition: We Deleted 60% of Our Blog Posts and Traffic Increased covers the content audit that identified this pattern on one site.

Finding 4 — Impressions Are a Lagging Lie

Here's the part that misleads most reporting: graveyard keywords show rising impressions.

This is counterintuitive. If nobody's clicking, why are impressions going up?

Because Google is showing your result more often to demonstrate that AI Overviews don't hide organic results. The intent is to show that search is still "open." The effect is that your impressions metric looks healthy while your traffic dies.

If you're reporting to stakeholders on impressions as a proxy for visibility, you're reporting a metric that now decouples from business outcomes. The honest metric for AI-era SEO is clicks. Not impressions. Not position. Clicks.

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What This Changes

The graveyard keyword problem has two implications for content strategy:

First: stop optimizing for graveyard queries. If a query has an AI Overview and your CTR is under 1.5% and declining, further optimization of that page for that query is not a good use of time. The ceiling is 0.8% CTR at position 1. More backlinks won't change that.

Second: audit your content investment. If 30–40% of your informational keyword targets have become graveyard keywords, that's 30–40% of your content investment that's generating impressions and not clicks. The question isn't "how do we rank better for these" — it's "what do we create instead."

The shift is toward content that AI can't summarize:

• Original data with proprietary methodology
• Case studies with specific client results
• Opinion pieces that take a position based on real experience
• Comparison content with genuine firsthand testing

This is harder to produce. It's slower. It requires real expertise. Which is exactly why it works. The queries that require it don't have AI Overviews yet because the source material doesn't exist at scale.

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How to Find Your Graveyard Keywords in GSC

This takes under 20 minutes.

1. Open Google Search Console → Performance → Search Results

1. Set date comparison: Last 3 months vs same period last year

1. Filter: Impressions > 500, average position < 10 (you want queries where you actually rank)

1. Sort by CTR change (ascending) — biggest CTR drops at the top

1. Export to Google Sheets

1. Filter for CTR current period < 2% — this isolates the graveyard candidates

1. Spot-check the top 50 manually in Google — verify AI Overview presence

The queries where AI Overviews appear and CTR is under 2% are your graveyard keywords. The ones where your position improved but CTR still dropped are the clearest cases.

For a faster verification: the AI Search Optimization: Strategic Moves post covers the full audit framework, including how to prioritize which graveyard keywords to redirect vs which to let decay.

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Related Experiments

Is SEO Dead? Navigating Search and AI in 2026 — the broader context for why traditional ranking metrics are decoupling from traffic outcomes.

5 AI Marketing Predictions for 2027 — prediction 3 covers where AI Overview coverage is expanding in 2026–2027 and which content types will be next.

We Deleted 60% of Our Blog Posts and Traffic Increased — the content audit that came after we identified our own graveyard keyword pool.

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Key Takeaways

• Graveyard keywords are queries with growing impressions, flat or improving positions, and dying CTR — the hallmark of AI Overview suppression.
• AI Overviews appear on 94% of graveyard keywords in our dataset. If you can identify your AI Overview exposure, you've found most of your graveyard keywords.
• The CTR floor for position 1 on an AI Overview query is around 0.8%. A position-5 ranking on a non-AI-Overview query generates more traffic.
• Graveyard keywords cluster in five predictable content formats: duration questions, definitions, step-by-step processes, binary evaluations, and numbered lists.
• Rising impressions on a keyword you're losing CTR on is not a good sign. It's Google showing your result to support the narrative that organic results still matter.

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We're tracking how fast AI Overview coverage expands across different query types quarter by quarter. Current rate: approximately 12 new query clusters per month reaching 50%+ AI Overview coverage in our monitored set. Q3 2026 data will tell us whether that rate is accelerating. We'll publish that in July.

Until then: run the GSC audit. Find your graveyard. Stop optimizing for it.