Asger Risom
The internet was built on temporary web addresses rather than permanent records, causing nearly 40 percent of webpages from 2013 to vanish within a decade. As link rot breaks citations across newsrooms, scientific journals, and Supreme Court rulings, archivists are racing to snapshot the web before our collective memory disappears.
Click on a source link in a news piece from 2014, and there is a decent chance your browser takes you straight to a dead end. No explanation, no redirection—just a blank white screen or a generic 404 message.
We treat the internet as an infallible permanent record, but the architecture underneath it was never engineered to last. Every time an IT team migrates a content management system, a startup goes bankrupt, or an owner forgets to renew an old domain, chunks of human knowledge evaporate. The technical term for this is link rot, and it is quietly dismantling our modern paper trail at an astonishing pace.
How the web breaks its own links
The root of the problem comes down to how the web was built in the early 1990s. Webpages rely on URLs, which stand for Uniform Resource Locators. The key word there is locator. A URL is not an identification number like an ISBN on the back of a paperback; it is an address pointing to a specific folder on a specific physical server.
If someone deletes that folder, tweaks the URL structure to chase search engine optimization, or stops paying the cloud hosting bill, the address stops pointing to anything. The web protocol does not care what used to live there. It simply drops the connection.
The scale of this decay is massive. A study by the Pew Research Center examined web pages sampled over a ten-year span and found that 38 percent of all pages from 2013 had vanished by late 2023. Even for content published in 2021, one out of every five links was dead just two years later. On Wikipedia, more than half of all articles contain at least one broken citation link, turning reference sections into minefields of dead code.
Broken evidence in courtrooms and labs
This is not just an inconvenience for people browsing old blogs. It is a systemic breakdown in accountability for law, journalism, and science.
When a journalist breaks an investigation, a scientist publishes a study, or a judge writes a court ruling, they link out to primary documents to prove their point. When those links break, the evidence disappears. Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain highlighted this rot in a landmark study for The Atlantic, noting that roughly half of the links cited in Supreme Court opinions no longer led to the original source material.
Even weirder is a secondary bug called content drift. A link might still resolve, but the text on the page has been overwritten. In several high-profile legal cases, web links cited by Supreme Court justices were snapped up by domain squatters, meaning official judicial opinions suddenly routed readers to online gambling portals or commercial advertisements.
Click to display external content from youtube,
– You can always enable and disable third-party content.
You agree to display external third-party content. Personal data may be sent to the provider of the content and other third-party services.
Caching the truth before it disappears
Because the open web has no built-in preservation layer, archivists have had to build one from scratch. Instead of trusting that a commercial server will stay online forever, initiatives like Harvard’s Perma.cc allow academics and courts to capture cryptographic snapshots of a source page the exact moment it is cited. That snapshot gets stored across an international network of university libraries, ensuring that even if the live website goes dark, the citation survives.
The web revolutionized access to information, but it also made evidence more fragile than it has ever been. Unless we actively back up the digital scaffolding our society relies on, the history we write today will simply vanish with the next server reboot.
