A 2024 study by the Pew Research Center found that 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible. Among pages from 2023, 8% were already gone. The web, it turns out, dissolves faster than most things in the physical world.
Link rot operates through several mechanisms. Domains expire when their owners stop paying registration fees. Content management systems are upgraded, breaking old URL structures. Companies are acquired or dissolved, and their web properties are taken offline. Personal homepages, once the dominant form of web presence, have been largely abandoned in favour of platform-hosted profiles — which themselves die when the platform dies.
The effect is cumulative and asymmetrical. Government and academic content survives at higher rates than commercial or personal content. English-language content outlasts content in smaller languages. Text outlasts images; images outlast video. The web's memory, such as it is, favours the powerful.
Some efforts resist. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has preserved over 800 billion pages. Perma.cc, a service for legal and scholarly citation, creates permanent archived copies of cited URLs. But these are sandbags against a tide. Most dissolution on the web goes unrecorded.
See also: digital decay, platform death.