Every link you save is a bet that the page will still be there when you go back. Based on the research below, that bet loses more often than most people assume — and it loses faster than you'd think.
A widely cited Pew Research Center analysis found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 no longer worked a decade later — roughly four in ten. A separate large-scale crawl by Ahrefs found that 66.5% of links pointing to sampled websites since January 2013 have rotted. The exact figure moves depending on methodology and what counts as "sampled," but every serious study lands in the same neighborhood: somewhere between a third and two-thirds of older links are already dead.
Link rot isn't a slow, even decay. One large-scale study found that only 6% of links from 2018 articles were dead, compared to 72% from 1998 — a stark reminder that content just a few years old is already meaningfully less reliable than this week's. But rot doesn't wait for content to age: Ahrefs' research found about 8% of all links break within their first three months, and 44% are gone within seven years. If you save a page today, the countdown has already started.
Link rot isn't confined to abandoned personal blogs. It shows up in the places you'd expect permanence the most:
That last figure is worth sitting with. If half of the citations in the country's highest court can quietly stop working, "I'll just leave it bookmarked" was never a plan — it was a hope.
Link rot isn't usually one dramatic event. It's the accumulation of small, ordinary ones: a company redesigns its site and doesn't set up redirects, a vendor deprecates an old product's docs, a blogging platform shuts down, a paywall goes up where there wasn't one, an author deletes an old post they're embarrassed by, a domain lapses. None of these individually seem like a crisis. Multiplied across billions of pages over years, they add up to the numbers above.
A bookmark is a promise the web didn't make. It only ever pointed at a page — it never held a copy of one.
If you have a reading list, a folder of research links, a wiki full of "see this vendor doc," or years of Slack messages with URLs in them, the statistics above apply to you directly — not hypothetically. A meaningful share of what you've saved is already gone, and more of it will be gone every year you don't do anything about it.
The fix isn't more diligent bookmarking. It's saving an actual copy of the page — the rendered HTML, the assets, the content — at the moment you first find it worth keeping, so the original site's future decisions about redesigns, paywalls, and shutdowns stop being your problem.
The Starchive saves a full, faithfully rendered copy the moment you archive a page — not just a link. Start a free 14-day trial, no credit card required.