Long-term linking on a volatile web is falling victim to link rot, as a new study shows 25% of deep links on NYT.com articles from 1996-2019 are inaccessible
Hyperlinks are a powerful tool for journalists and their readers. Diving deep into the context of an article is just a click away.
Context & Ripple Effects
The CJR study quantified a problem publishers had long sensed: a quarter of the deep links inside NYT.com articles from 1996-2019 now lead nowhere, meaning the citations that gave those pieces their evidentiary weight are quietly dissolving. The story sits at the start of a documented arc — earlier attempts at self-healing included the Amber plugin for WordPress and Drupal, which stored a mirror of every outbound link as a fallback.
The pattern has since worsened at web scale: Pew later found 38% of pages from 2013 are gone and 23% of news pages carry at least one broken link, and preservation projects like Perma emerged to give scholarly and legal authors a way to freeze links permanently.
First-order effects
- NYT.com readers following citations in pre-2020 reporting hit dead ends on roughly one in four deep links, undermining the archive's value as a verifiable record.
- The study hands journalists, editors, and fact-checkers a concrete baseline for auditing their own archives rather than treating link rot as an abstract annoyance.
Second-order effects
- Publishers face pressure to adopt fallback mechanisms — the approach Amber piloted for WordPress and Drupal sites and Perma built for enduring documents — turning link preservation into an editorial infrastructure cost.
- Archives and libraries gain a mandate: as Pew's finding that 38% of 2013 webpages are unavailable shows, the burden of preserving the cited web shifts from the original link's owner to third-party stewards.
Third-order effects
- If decay rates hold — The Verge's coverage of Pew's data frames digital decay as erasing all kinds of media — the citation layer of the web becomes durable only where someone actively mirrors it, making preservation services a standard part of publishing rather than an optional plugin.
- Journalism's authority increasingly depends on archive interoperability: outlets whose citations remain resolvable will hold a verifiability advantage over those whose deep links rot, pushing the industry toward shared preservation norms.
The trend: The web's citation layer is decaying faster than publishers maintain it, shifting link preservation from an individual site's courtesy to a shared archival infrastructure.