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Link rot study finds more than 1/3 websites from 2013 are gone [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2025-09-16

A study of digital decay, the phenomenon of websites slowly vanishing from the web, found that 38 percent of the sites that were online in 2013 are now gone. When Online Content Disappears found that 8% of sites from just two years ago are no longer accessible. The phenomenon was tracked via link rot from news sites and wikipedia.

23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.

54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their "References" section that points to a page that no longer exists.

A lot of it is disappearing tweets—consider their use as good-enough "sources" for news stories over the last decade. But government websites and resources are disappearing too.

We sampled around 500,000 pages from government websites using the Common Crawl March/April 2023 snapshot… When we followed these links, we found that 6% point to pages that are no longer accessible. Similar shares of internal and external links are no longer functional. Overall, 21% of all the government webpages we examined contained at least one broken link. Across every level of government we looked at, there were broken links on at least 14% of pages; city government pages had the highest rates of broken links.

Something to bear in mind: the older a website is, the more human the activity it represents. By the mid-2010s, simple programs are padding site content for SEO, the age of chum, but by the 2020s we're in the age of slop: LLMs have come along to do it at overwhelming scale. So while the 38% of websites gone from 2013 is startling, much of what comes and goes now represents the life cycle of slop: automatically reprocessed content posted temporarily to manipulate search engines and chatbots, and rarely encountered by humans.

Previously:

• An obscure copyright law is letting the Internet Archive distribute books published 1923-1941

• Internet Archive ending free e-books program over publisher lawsuit, National Emergency Library to close for 2 weeks

• Internet Archive loses book lending lawsuit

• Internet Archive forced to remove half a million books

• Internet Archive to open their physical archive for a rare behind-the-scenes tour

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/09/16/link-rot-study-finds-more-than-1-3-websites-from-2013-are-gone.html

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