Decay Radar

Identifies pages losing rankings due to AI-content penalties and prioritizes human-rewrite targets; sold to SEO agencies and publishers at $300-800/mo per site portfolio. · SEO monitoring software

DEAD SLOW · CAUTIOUS

6.2 ShipScore / 10

Strong: hands-off SaaS economics. Weakest: Google-dependent data and thin defensibility.

Condition: Prove your AI-penalty scoring beats plain traffic-decline alerts on 10 real client portfolios, and secure a durable ranking-data source not dependent on one scraper.

Part I — The Verdict what the instruments read

01 — The ShipScore breakdown

Control

C5 — ranking/GSC data leans on Google APIs and SERP scrapers

Entry barriers

E4 — EarlySEO/Keytomic exist but no growth trend; heuristics cloneable

Need

N7 — $100k + $18k verified MRR; AI-decay wedge is distinct

Time-freedom

T8 — crawl, score, alert; no operator hours per site

Scale

S7 — global agencies and publishers, $300-800/mo portfolios

What the five commandments measure

C — Control	Do you own the customer, or does a gatekeeper stand between you and revenue?
E — Entry	How hard is this to copy once it works? A rival's existence isn't the question — the durability of their advantage is.
N — Need	Is demand proven with money rather than vibes?
T — Time	Can income detach from your hours, or did you buy yourself a job?
S — Scale	How far does it reach without linear cost?

Scored on the evidence below, against CENTS as we've adapted it plus a Buffett-style moat reading of every rival — the same referee for every idea, including the ones we generate ourselves. The verdict follows the arithmetic: we never relabel a score to make it read better, and the weakest commandment is always named. The exact rubric stays in-house so the scale can't be written for.

02 — The pace test — $1M/yr

At $400/mo (assumed category price), you need 209 subscribers for a $1M/yr pace.

Nearest tracked rivals on that curve:

MarkupX Brands / EarlySEO

$100k 100%

X · quiet

Keytomic

$18k 22%

Part II — The Evidence the receipts, good and bad

03 — Rival scan — corpus tracks 2 similar

MarkupX Brands / EarlySEO	verified MRR $100k · CENTS 6.4 · X-chatter: low (x)	X · quiet
Keytomic	verified MRR $18k (x)

MarkupX Brands / EarlySEO — $100k verified MRR and existing agency distribution; can bolt on decay alerts.
Keytomic — $18k MRR proves paid SEO monitoring lane; nearer your price band.
Generic rank/GSC dashboards — Agencies already own rank trackers; your feature reads as a report tab.

04 — Demand evidence

EarlySEO verified at $100k MRR — real recurring spend in SEO monitoring.
Keytomic at $18k MRR confirms a second paying operator in the lane.
Corpus notes 0 of the tracked verified-revenue products stall under $2k MRR.
Zero Reddit signals and X probe unavailable — no direct pain-language evidence for 'AI-content decay'.

05 — Risks

'AI-content penalty' is unobservable; Google never confirms it — attribution may be guesswork.
Google algorithm shifts could make the entire detection premise obsolete overnight.
SERP/ranking data costs scale with portfolio size, squeezing $300-800 margins.
Buyers may treat this as a one-off audit, not a monthly subscription.

06 — Kill switches — what kills this with one decision

Google Search Console API / SERP access — Tighter rate limits or anti-scraping enforcement removes your core data input.
Google algorithm policy shift — If AI content stops being penalized, the product's premise disappears.
Incumbent bundling — EarlySEO or a rank tracker ships decay scoring free, collapsing standalone pricing.

Part III — The Plan if you insist on proceeding

07 — What this scan can't tell you

Cannot verify whether EarlySEO or Keytomic revenue is growing or flat.
No evidence agencies specifically pay for AI-penalty attribution versus generic traffic decay.
Cannot assess data-source cost per tracked page at portfolio scale.

Scores judge the market and business model — not your ability to execute. Verified MRR = independently tracked revenue; reviews/upvotes = platform-reported. Judged 2026-08-20.

08 — The wedge & the next step

Sell rewrite prioritization ROI to publishers with 10k+ legacy pages — rank the 50 pages worth rewriting, not just alert on decline.

Cheapest next step: Run free decay audits on three agency portfolios this week; see if any pre-pay for monthly monitoring.

Not quite it? Spin the model

Business-model variations of this idea, engineered to beat 6.2 — different vertical, audience, model, or wedge. Same harsh scale. Pro feature.

One evidence-backed gap a day, free

Close — but conditional. Every morning the engine files one mined gap, scored on the same harsh scale as this one. Free at 7am AEST, unedited.

Free forever · one email a day · unsubscribe in one click.

Monitor this idea

Weekly re-scan against the live corpus. If the market moves this ShipScore by a point, or flips the verdict, you hear about it. Free while we're small.