Most decade-old links are dead

Why this one

Link rot is quoted constantly and almost always with somebody else’s number attached to a different population. Pew measured web pages generally. The sentence people repeat is about links they saved — the well-read ones, the ones with an audience keeping them alive. Those are two different things, and the difference is the whole finding.

The rule, fixed before the data was fetched

The bar was the band people repeat, 20–35 % gone outright after ten years, and every verdict was defined before the crawl: gone is 4xx, 5xx, DNS failure, connection refused, timeout or SSL failure; a redirect that lands on a working page is not gone; a redirect that collapses to a site root is counted separately as moved-root; a 200 whose title says “not found” is a soft-404, reported apart and never folded in silently. The sample was 100 stories a year at 100 points or more, eighteen years, 1,800 URLs, drawn with a fixed seed.

What happened

17.0 % for the 2014–2016 cohorts at 100 points or more — below the band. The looser count, which folds in root redirects and pages that render “not found” with a 200, takes the 2013 cohort to 36 %, and that does sit inside Pew’s figure. So the claim is true of one definition and false of the other, and whoever repeats it almost never says which.

Two things worth keeping from the method: the fall is a step at 2015/16 rather than a smooth decay, and 13 % of the links are blocked to this server even when a headless browser asks. A crawl from a data centre reads some of that blocking as death.

The limit

Hacker News links are not the web. They skew technical, and technical publishers keep their URLs better than most. One request from one server on one evening: a timeout is a fact about that evening, not about the page.

Edited on 4 October 2026: the place the request was sent from was taken out. The seal of the first version is still at the registry.