Hey friend, how’s it going? 🌻
I read an article this week that did everything right and still decayed.
Clean structure. Clearly written by a person who knew the topic. The kind of page you skim and think, yeah, that’s solid.
Then I pulled up its traffic and watched it fall from over 2,000 visits to zero in about six months. Over 400 keywords ranked at launch. Almost none now.
This is the first edition of #ContentIcks, where I take a real published page, look at what it actually did in search, and name the thing quietly killing it.
The brand is ClickUp, and the page is their “best ChatGPT alternatives” listicle.
Let’s get into it 👇
📌 TL;DR
A BOFU page can be well written and still rank for nothing. The writing was never what saved it.
This one slid from 2,000+ visits and 400+ ranking keywords to near zero in about six months
The sitewide blog decline is real, but it explains the timing, not the rot
The actual ick: ClickUp isn’t a ChatGPT alternative, and the page never resolves that claim
Twenty tools of completely different types in one list isn’t depth. It’s noise wearing a thoroughness costume.
The home team gets 1,000+ words while real rivals get a line, and readers feel the imbalance even when they can’t name it
You must be aware that ClickUp has lost over 97% of organic traffic…
Here is the obvious explanation, and it deserves a fair hearing. ClickUp’s blog has been losing traffic across the board for a while now (Kamila Olexa wrote a good breakdown, worth a read). So you could file this page under collateral damage.
And you would be partly right. A sitewide decline is a real thing that happened.
But it does not explain why this particular page had nothing to hold onto when the traffic dropped. This BOFU article had some problems when it was first published. The decline is the proof.
So what actually happened to this article?
A page decays when you position it into a consideration set it does not belong in.
That is the whole thing. The writing can be genuinely good. The decision that killed it happened earlier, in the brief, when someone decided what this page was competing with. And that decision was wrong before a single sentence got typed.
Let me show you the three places it shows up.
#1 Intent is a claim. And the claim has to be true.
Is ClickUp a ChatGPT alternative? Not really.
Someone typing “ChatGPT alternatives” already has a picture in their head. They are thinking Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Perplexity. A work management platform is not in that picture, and the article never stops to draw the line between what ChatGPT is actually for and what ClickUp is.
#2 A list is a promise that these things belong together
Look at the tools part of the “ChatGPT alternatives” list apart from ClickUp:
Generative chat tools (Gemini, Claude).
Copywriting tools (Jasper, Writesonic).
An SEO tool (Surfer).
Coding assistants (CodeWhisperer, GitHub Copilot).
All on one list, as if the person choosing among them is the same person. They are not.
These tools solve different problems for different people, and the article never sets a use case up top to hold them together. So the comparison has no basis.
This is the part that gets BOFU backward. BOFU is not a coverage game. Its entire value is narrow, honest, like-for-like depth, the stuff someone needs when they are one decision away from buying. Twenty mismatched tools are not comprehensive.
#3 How much room you give something tells the reader what you think
ClickUp’s own section runs past a thousand words. The real alternatives get fewer than 400 words.
For example, Claude, A real (and probably better alternative to ChatGPT) gets shrunk to simply a “creative, conversational text generation platform.” The article was written or updated in February 2026. Ideally, by then, Claude will have introduced so many new features, and this article simply positions it as a text generation platform. It is a line written to keep the competitor small, so ClickUp can look bigger.
Someone looking for ChatGPT alternatives already knows how powerful Claude is; reducing it down to this extent is simply inappropriate.
And then there is GEO. When an AI engine is deciding what to pull into an answer, that imbalance is not just a vibe a human picks up. It is legible. What reads as dishonest to a person reads as low-quality to the system, which chooses what to surface.
What I would have done instead
The first move might not be to write it. At least that’s what I would have done because ClickUp and ChatGPT are in no way something to be placed together
But say you want the page anyway. Here is how I would have gone about it.
I would pick one real intent and commit. Which kind of ChatGPT alternative is this for: writing, research, coding, or general chat? Name it in the H1 and the first two lines, so the reader knows in five seconds whether they are in the right place.
I would cut the list to three to five tools that actually compete on that intent. The depth is the entire point.
I would give every tool its honest, current version, including the ones that compete with me. Especially those. If a rival is strong at something, I would just say so, because the reader already knows, and pretending otherwise only costs me their trust.
AND I wouldn’t even list ClickUp as a direct alternative to ChatGPT. I would probably present it as a bonus tool and instead focus on ClickUp and ChatGPT integration. Or maybe how ClickUp integrates with all these tools.
The discipline here is subtraction. Cut tools, cut claims you cannot defend, cut the parts where you are unnecessarily flattering yourself.
Writing was not always the hard part
Human writing used to be a moat. It is not anymore. A model can produce a tidy, readable, grammatically perfect listicle in a minute, and increasingly it does.
What survives is positioning honesty. Pages that earned their spot in the search instead of muscling into one. Pages where the intent is true, the comparison is fair, and the reader leaves trusting you a little more than when they arrived.
P.S. Which article do you want me to pick up next? Reply to the mail and let me know!
P.P.S. I have nothing against the brand, the writer, or the team that published it. This is a simple analysis by a fellow marketer.
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Onwards and upwards
Sreyashi