What is link rot?
Link rot is what happens when a link stops leading to the page it used to: the page is deleted, moved, put behind a paywall or the site disappears. Over time, every collection of links decays.
Guides
By Sharier, founder of DefyRot
Updated October 21, 2026
Link rot, defined
A link has rotted when following it no longer gets you the original page. Usually you see an error such as 404 Not Found or 410 Gone, a server error, or a redirect to an unrelated home page. A related problem is content drift: the link still works, but the page now says something different from what you read or cited.
How common is it?
Very. In its 2024 study When Online Content Disappears, Pew Research Center found that:
- 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible in 2023.
- 25% of all pages that existed at some point from 2013 to 2023 were gone.
- 23% of news pages and 21% of government pages contained at least one broken link.
- 54% of Wikipedia articles had at least one link in their references that pointed to a page that no longer exists.
In law, a 2014 Harvard study found that about half of the links in US Supreme Court opinions no longer led to the information originally cited.
What causes link rot?
- Deleted pages: old posts, products and documentation are removed.
- Moved pages: a redesign changes the addresses without redirecting the old ones.
- Paywalls and logins: a page that was free now needs an account.
- Expired domains: the owner stops paying and the whole site disappears.
- Closed services: when a platform shuts down, everything on it goes with it.
How to avoid link rot
If you run a website: keep your addresses stable, add a permanent (301) redirect whenever a page moves, and check your outgoing links now and then.
If you rely on other people's pages (for research, writing, development or work):
- Archive pages you cite in the Wayback Machine and include the archive link (see how to archive a web page).
- Keep your own copy of pages you depend on, so a dead link never costs you the content.
How DefyRot protects your links
DefyRot is a Chrome extension built for exactly this. When you save a page, it keeps a clean, readable copy in your browser. When that link later breaks (a 404, a 410 or a domain that no longer exists), DefyRot opens your copy instead of the error page; if the site is only down, it asks first. With Pro, DefyRot also checks your saved links every day in the background, and you can scan them any time.