Link Rot: Why 38% of the Web Has Already Disappeared

August 23, 2026 · 7 min read · Broken Link Checker team

Link rot is the gradual death of hyperlinks as the pages they point to are moved, deleted, or lost with their entire sites. It isn't an edge case — it's the web's default trajectory. Pew Research Center found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible ten years later. Every links page, article, and bibliography decays on this schedule unless someone intervenes. Here's what the research shows, why it happens, and what intervention looks like.

The numbers are worse than most people expect

Link rot has been measured repeatedly, on very different corners of the web, with strikingly consistent results:

The web at large: Pew Research Center's 2024 study "When Online Content Disappears" found 38% of pages from 2013 unreachable by 2023 — and even 8% of pages that existed in 2023 were gone within the same year. The study also found that about one in five government webpages and 23% of news pages contained at least one broken link, and 54% of Wikipedia articles had at least one dead link in their references.
The law: Harvard researchers examining U.S. Supreme Court opinions found roughly half of the URLs cited in them no longer led to the original content. Citations in the country's most carefully edited legal documents rot like everything else.
Journalism: a 2021 Harvard study of links in New York Times articles found about a quarter of all deep links dead — rising steeply with age, to over 70% for links from 1998.

The pattern to internalize: rot is a function of time. A page's links are nearly all alive on publication day, and every year after that a slice quietly dies. The older your content, the more of its references are gone right now.

Why links die

Domains expire. Companies fold, side projects get abandoned, renewal emails go to dead inboxes. The whole site vanishes — DNS stops resolving, and every link to any of its pages breaks at once.
Sites reorganize. Redesigns, new CMSs, "cleaner" URL schemes. If nobody writes redirects (see how to fix broken links), every old URL becomes a 404 in a still-living site — the most preventable form of rot, and the most common.
Content gets pruned. Old posts deleted in "content audits," products retired, user accounts closed, and whatever those pages hosted goes with them.
Platforms shut down. When a hosting platform, URL shortener, or social network dies, it takes every page and shortened link it ever served. Decades of GeoCities, Google+, and countless smaller services exist only in archives now.
Content drifts. The subtler cousin ("content drift"): the URL still returns 200, but the page no longer says what it said when you linked it — a product page turned into a redirect trap, an article rewritten beyond recognition. No checker can catch this; only archives preserve what you actually cited.

What link rot does to your site

Rot hits you from both directions:

Outbound: your published pages accumulate dead references year after year. Readers hit walls; the page reads as abandoned; and unmaintained content is exactly what search quality guidelines say to rank below fresher work. The mechanics are in do broken links hurt SEO?
Inbound: when you delete or move your own pages carelessly, every link the web has pointed at you — from articles, forums, newsletters you'll never see — starts hitting 404s. The authority those links carried evaporates until you restore or redirect the URLs.

How to fight it

Protect your outbound links

Scan on a schedule. Rot is continuous, so checking must be periodic: key pages monthly, everything after a redesign. A one-click scan with a browser extension makes this a coffee-break task instead of a project — open the page, scan, fix the red list. (Full tooling comparison: how to find broken links.)
Link to archives for fragile sources. For citations that must survive — research, legal, anything on a small personal site — link a Wayback Machine snapshot alongside or instead of the live URL.
Prefer durable URLs. Root domains and canonical permalinks outlive campaign URLs, tracking-parameter links, and URL-shortener aliases, which add a second point of failure.

Don't inflict rot on others

Never move content without a 301. Every migration needs a redirect map from each old URL to its successor. This single habit prevents most self-inflicted rot.
Keep URLs boring and stable. As the W3C put it back in 1998: cool URIs don't change. Don't put dates, categories, or technology names in paths you'll want to rename later.
Retire content deliberately. If something must die with no successor, let it return an honest 404/410 with a helpful error page — and check Search Console for inbound links worth redirecting first.

Rule of thumb: if a page is older than two years and has never been rechecked, assume some of its links are dead. The studies above suggest that assumption is almost always right.

The takeaway

The web forgets by default. Roughly a third of what existed a decade ago is gone, and the links on your own pages are decaying at the same background rate — silently, with no error log, until a visitor finds the hole. The defense isn't heroic: stable URLs, redirects when things move, archives for fragile citations, and a periodic scan that takes less time than reading this article did.