Why it matters
You can publish and refresh content all day. Without a way to tie those updates to traffic, you’re guessing about which work paid off. Content Updates connects each publish or refresh to the clicks, impressions, citations, and engagement metrics that came after, so you can prove what worked, repeat it, and stop doing what didn’t.Where to find it
Go to Insights → Pages. Two tabs power this feature:- Performance — the dashboard that answers “is it helping traffic?”
- Update History — the underlying ledger of every update, used for logging, auditing, and editing entries.
How traffic impact gets measured
Two things need to be true for Slate to tell you whether a page update worked:- The update is in the ledger. Workflows that publish through CMS blocks or the Track Content Update block log this automatically. Updates made directly in your CMS or by a teammate need to be logged manually on the Update History tab.
- At least one search or analytics source is connected. Google Search Console powers clicks and impressions, GA4 powers engagement time, and AI Visibility powers AI citations.
Find out if your publishing or refreshing is moving traffic
Open the Performance tab in Pages, then work through these four steps.Step 1: Pick the window you want to evaluate
The Performance tab has its own date picker, separate from the rest of Pages. Range presets:
Comparison options (drives the deltas on the KPI cards):
Pick a range that covers the work you want to evaluate — a sprint, a quarter, or a year. Pick a comparison that reflects the question you’re asking. “Are we shipping more than last year?” → vs same period last year. “Did this month’s push beat last month’s?” → vs previous period.
Step 2: Read publishing cadence against search performance
The Search performance vs publishing cadence chart overlays your output on your search results.- Bars: Published (dark) and Refreshed (orange) per bucket.
- Lines: Clicks (solid) and Impressions (dashed), from Google Search Console.
- Lines climb in the buckets where bars are tallest → your publishing rhythm is correlating with search demand.
- Lines stay flat or fall while bars are tall → output is not converting to traffic. Drop into Step 3 to find which pages are pulling their weight and which aren’t.
Step 3: Find the specific pages that moved the needle
The Top performing pages table lists up to 25 of the most recent updates in the period, sorted by clicks.
How to use it to answer the traffic question:
- Check the change next to each click count. Positive changes are patterns to study and repeat. Negative changes are pages that lost traffic after you updated them — worth opening to see what changed.
- Click Published to evaluate net-new pages on their own; click Refreshed to evaluate refreshes on their own. Click All to see both. This separates “is publishing working?” from “is refreshing working?”
- Click Citations (First 28 Days) to sort by AI citations when you care about visibility in AI answers, not just search clicks. Click Clicks (First 28 Days) to sort by clicks again.
Step 4: Read the headline numbers
The KPI cards at the top of the tab give you the period summary. Published and Refreshed each show a sparkline of the trend and a delta against the comparison period:
The deltas tell you whether your output is changing period-over-period. The chart and the table tell you whether that output is working. Read them together — high output with negative click changes in Top performing pages means you’re shipping more without moving traffic.
Keep the ledger complete
The Performance tab is only as accurate as the ledger feeding it. The Update History tab is where you keep that ledger clean.How updates get into the ledger
The Source column in the Update History table tells you which path each entry came from.
Update types
Drafts are kept in the ledger but do not count toward Published or Refreshed totals on Performance — so they don’t pollute the traffic-impact picture.
Log a manual update
Use this when content ships outside of Slate (a teammate publishes directly in WordPress, an agency edits a Webflow page) and you want it counted on the Performance tab.- On the Update History tab, click Add update.
- Enter the Page URL.
- Choose the Update type — Published or Refreshed.
- Pick the Date of update.
- Toggle Draft on if the page is not yet live.
- Click Add update.
Edit or delete an entry
- Find the entry in the table.
- Click the three-dot menu (⋯) at the end of the row.
- Select Edit to change the URL, type, date, or draft status, then click Save changes. Select Delete, then click Delete again to confirm.
Update several entries at once
Use this to mark drafts as live, or to fix the type or date on many entries.- On the Update History tab, select the checkbox next to each entry. The header checkbox selects every entry on the current page.
- Click Update selected.
- Choose the Update type — Published or Refreshed.
- Under Date of update, choose Same as draft date to keep each entry’s date, or Specific date to set one date for all.
- Click Update selected.
Filter and search
- Date range — pick a preset or set a custom range.
- Update type — click Add filter > Update type and choose Publish, Refresh, or Draft.
- URL search — type any part of a URL to filter by page.
Source labels
When the source has a name (the workflow’s name, for example), it appears after the label as
Workflow · My Publish Flow.
Use cases
Prove a content sprint moved traffic
Set the Performance range to the sprint window and choose vs previous period. The KPI cards show whether output went up. The chart shows whether clicks and impressions followed. The Top performing pages table names the specific pages that drove the result.Decide whether to publish more or refresh more
On the Performance tab, look at the deltas on Published and Refreshed alongside the click changes in Top performing pages, filtered to each type. Whichever motion shows more pages with a positive change is the one worth doubling down on next quarter.Find your highest-leverage refresh patterns
Filter Top performing pages to Refreshed, then look for the largest positive changes next to the click counts. These refreshes gained the most search traffic in the first 28 days. Open them, study what changed, and apply the same pattern to similar pages.Spot pages that lost traffic after a refresh
Filter Top performing pages to Refreshed and look for negative changes next to the click counts. These are refreshes that hurt traffic — open them, compare what changed, and roll back or rewrite as needed.Audit ledger completeness before a stakeholder review
Before reporting on content performance, spend a minute on the Update History tab. Filter by date range and scan the Source column. If you see fewer Manual entries than you expected for the period, your team is probably shipping content directly in the CMS without logging it — and your Performance numbers will undercount the work.Tips
- The Performance tab and Update History tab use independent date pickers. Keep Performance on a long reporting window (90 days, 12 months) and Update History on a tighter window for editing.
- The Citations (First 28 Days) column on Top performing pages only appears when at least one listed page has AI citation data. Set up AI Visibility to populate it.
- Engagement time comes from GA4 — connect Google Analytics for that column to populate.
- If a workflow logs the same URL on the same day as an existing entry, the system deduplicates rather than creating a second row.
- Use canonical URLs (no tracking parameters) so manual entries match workflow-logged entries on the same page.
What’s next
- Track Content Update block — log updates automatically from a workflow
- Pages — find pages that need refreshing in the first place
- AI Visibility — power the Citations column
- Webflow block — publish to Webflow from a workflow
- Workflows overview — build automations that publish and log updates in one run