The Internet Is Not Forever: 38% of Web Pages From 2013 No Longer Exist
A new study on the state of link rot suggests that a floppy disk might have better odds of surviving the next decade with its information intact than a web page published today.
The Pew Research Center finds that 38% of the pages extant in 2013 were no longer accessible in October 2023 and that a quarter of the pages that were online at some point over that period have now vanished.
Pew’s study, based on a sample of almost a million pages recorded by the nonprofit archive Common Crawl, also documents how this “digital decay” has eroded the utility of news and government sites as well as Wikipedia, with links at those places increasingly serving up only 404 error messages.
On a sample of 500,000 government sites, 21% of those pages featured at least one broken link. Across 2,063 news sites, that fraction was 23%. And among 50,000 English-language Wikipedia pages sampled, 54% harbored at least one busted link in their “References” section.
In addition to the web, Pew’s researchers inspected X, still called Twitter at the time of their survey, and that's even more ephemeral. Of 4.8 million tweets Pew collected from March 8 to April 27 last year using a platform API, 18% were no longer publicly visible by June 15.
