A look at the quickly disappearing web, as digital decay and link rot erase all kinds of media; a Pew study says 38% of webpages accessible in 2013 are now gone
The internet is forever. But also, it isn't. What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish at random?
The VergeS.E. Smith
Context & Ripple Effects
The Pew findings extend a long-running record of web impermanence: prior coverage found that a quarter of deep links in a large New York Times article sample were inaccessible, while preservation projects have sought to make citations durable through permanent-link archives.
The issue is not just old pages being retired. The reported loss of pages from both 2013 and 2023 makes digital preservation an active maintenance problem for publishers, researchers, and institutions that depend on web sources.
First-order effects
Readers and researchers encounter more dead references, reducing the usability and verifiability of reporting, scholarship, and other web-native material.
Citation-heavy institutions and authors have greater incentive to use preservation services or archived copies rather than rely on a publisher’s live URL alone.
News organizations’ back catalogs become less valuable and less navigable when outbound sources and internal references fail, increasing the operational case for archive maintenance.
Third-order effects
If decay continues across newer as well as older pages, the web’s role as a durable public record will depend increasingly on dedicated preservation infrastructure rather than ordinary publishing systems.
The pattern favors durable identifiers, migration practices, and institutional archiving as baseline publishing requirements, though the corpus does not establish which approaches will become standard.
The trend: Link rot is shifting digital preservation from a niche archival task toward an ongoing requirement for preserving the web’s cultural and evidentiary record.
this is such a good piece about the ephemeral nature of the internet and how we should think about the future of AI sludge and content creation: www.theverge.com/24321569/int...
This is why I still renew my URL for my ancient blog every two years, even though I haven't been able to use it for most of the last decade: Because I know the links were out there and part of a conversation once upon a time, and I don't want to create linkrot if I can stave it o…
I feel this. decades of my work, writing, and reporting on consumer policy issues have gone poof — corporatist and authoritarian power structures alike don't really like collective informed history because there's a chance people might just learn from past experience [embedded …
“When you describe yourself as a “writer” but your writing has become hard to find, it creates a crisis not just of profession, but identity. Who am I, if not my content?” — real banger from @sesmith.bsky.social here
I'm 100% the flip side of this not every tiny little thing is important — Your verge article doesn't need to live forever or even next week. So much “content” of the world is ephemeral and there is a new arrogance to say it all must last — I am not my content — I am me …
I'm at @theverge.com today talking about digital decay, link rot, watching my work slowly being erased from the internet, and how it makes me feel like I am fading away.
“a layer of green, foamy scum clings to the surface of the ocean so that when the waves wash your footprints away, they are replaced by a layer of vile, reeking slime dotted by writhing marine organisms. This is, at times, how the internet feels right now.” www.theverge.com/2432…
1. So many people have subscribed to The Verge that we ran out of Content Goblins zines and had to order a second printing 😎 — 2. Here's the final, previously print-only story in the series - now free for all to read because so many of you have supported us already! www.theverg…