Link Rot: How Long Short Links Really Last (We Checked)

Link rot is the slow failure of URLs over time: a page moves or a whole site goes dark, and the link stops resolving. Short links add a second point of failure, because the shortener's own redirect has to keep working. Retire the shortener and every link it ever made dies at once.

So we measured it. We pulled 2,765 short links that Common Crawl captured between 2014 and 2023, then re-resolved every one in 2026. One in four, 25%, no longer works, and TinyURL and goo.gl links fared worst at 36% and 33%. A second sample, drawn from Wikipedia citations, shows why that number is really a moving target: whether a link survives is a decision made by the company that owns the redirect.

How bad is link rot, really?

It's worse than most people guess. Pew Research found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible by October 2023, and 8% of the pages it collected in 2023 had already died inside that same year (Pew Research, 2024).

The whole-web rate

Ahrefs put a weekly number on the decay. Across roughly 2 million domains, about 1.3% of links rot every week, and 66.5% of the links it studied over nine years were already dead, climbing to 74.5% once temporary errors are counted (Ahrefs).

Archives, news, and courts

News archives rot just as hard as the open web. A Harvard and Columbia Journalism Review study of 2.28 million New York Times links found 25% were completely inaccessible, and 72% of links from 1998 were dead against just 6% from 2018 (CJR, 2021).

Courts fare worse. Zittrain and colleagues found roughly 50% of hyperlinks in US Supreme Court opinions, and over 70% in the Harvard Law Review, led to dead or changed content (Harvard Law Review, 2014).

How fast social posts vanish

Social posts disappear fastest. Pew found 18% of tweets gone within three months of posting: 1% within an hour, 3% within a day, and 10% within a week (Pew Research, 2024).

What makes a short link riskier than an ordinary one?

A short link has two ways to break where an ordinary URL has one. The destination can rot like any page, and the shortener's redirect can stop on its own. Google demonstrated the second failure at scale: it disabled new goo.gl links in 2018, then set every goo.gl link to deactivate on August 25, 2025 (Google Developers Blog).

Short links die for reasons that have nothing to do with your content:

• Service shutdown. Google retired goo.gl, and the US government decommissioned its own 1.USA.gov shortener back in 2016 (USA.gov).
• Plan lapse or downgrade. Bitly's own documentation says that after you downgrade, you can no longer edit or redirect links on a custom domain, and a complimentary custom domain is not renewed, so those links break once its registration expires (Bitly).
• A lost short domain. If the custom domain behind the links changes hands or expires, every link built on it stops at once.
• Acquisition or pivot. New owners retire old products, and the redirect quietly goes with them.
• Deliberate purges. Some services delete links after a trial ends or a stretch of inactivity.

Bitly does say its free-plan links "don't expire" (Bitly), but that describes one company's current policy, and policies change. A t.co link works only while X keeps running t.co, and TinyURL offers no permanence guarantee.

What we found when we re-resolved 2,765 short links

We collected short links that Common Crawl had captured in its 2014, 2017, 2020, and 2023 web archives, across eight shorteners, then re-resolved each one in July 2026. Of 2,765 links we could score, 2,072 were alive and 693 were dead, an overall dead rate of 25% (our Common Crawl corpus). We set aside a further 572 links that returned a server error or blocked our request, since those can't be called dead with confidence.

Which shorteners rot fastest

The spread is the story. A link's odds of surviving ride less on its age than on whose shortener it sits behind. The oldest links we checked, captured in 2014, were the most dead at 33%, but the 2017 and 2020 links land close together, so age stops predicting much once a link is a few years old.

How we scored each link

A link counted as alive if it returned a success or redirect status, dead if it returned a 404 or 410 or the connection failed, and inconclusive if it returned a server error or blocked our request, which we set aside.

The clearest proof: Google decided which links lived

The sharpest evidence that a shortener's owner holds the off switch came from a second sample. We pulled 935 short links still cited as references in Wikipedia and re-resolved those too. Only 3.7% were dead, but 907 of them were goo.gl/maps links, the exact category Google chose to preserve when it retired the general-purpose goo.gl shortener. On August 1, 2025 Google reversed part of its shutdown, keeping links still active in late 2024, and links made inside its own apps such as Maps share links, working (Google Developers Blog).

So those Maps links survived at about 97%, while the generic goo.gl links in our Common Crawl sample died at 33%. Same company, same shortener, opposite fates, decided by a policy call.

A short link's lifespan isn't a technical property of the link. It's a business decision made by whoever owns the redirect.

Whether your short link still resolves next year comes down to whoever holds that off switch, and that is rarely you.

What does link rot mean for printed QR codes?

A printed QR code can't be edited after it leaves the printer, so when the short link it encodes dies, the code becomes dead paper. That's what happened to QR codes built on goo.gl links after Google set the shortener to deactivate on August 25, 2025 (Google Developers Blog).

Static and dynamic codes fail in different ways, which we broke down in our guide to whether QR codes expire. The short version: a static code lasts exactly as long as its destination, and a public short link is a fragile thing to bet a print run on.

Keeping a short link alive means owning the redirect

Every failure above shares one cause: someone else held the off switch. Google retired goo.gl, the US government retired 1.USA.gov in 2016 (USA.gov), and Bitly's downgrade rule breaks custom-domain links the moment a plan lapses (Bitly).

No tool can promise immortality, and I won't pretend otherwise. What a pay-once model removes is the specific failure mode behind most of the dead links above: a subscription that lapses or gets retired while your links are still out in the wild. There's no monthly bill to miss.

That's the case for Whooshly, a one-time $49 toolkit. Its short links run on its own redirect engine, and its dynamic links and QR codes stay editable, so a dead destination can be re-pointed instead of reprinted. Try the free URL shortener first, and if you're leaving a metered service, the Bitly alternative comparison covers the move.

Sources and method

We built two first-party samples and re-resolved both in July 2026. The main one is 2,765 short links that Common Crawl captured in its 2014, 2017, 2020, and 2023 web archives, across eight shorteners (bit.ly, tinyurl.com, ow.ly, is.gd, goo.gl, t.co, buff.ly, j.mp), sampled from its public URL index. The second is 935 short links still cited as references in English Wikipedia, pulled through its external-links API (exturlusage). For each link we sent an automated HTTP request that follows redirects: a link counts as alive on a final success or redirect status, dead on a 404 or 410 or a failed connection, and inconclusive on a server error or a bot block, which we exclude. In the Common Crawl sample, 25% of 2,765 links were dead; the Wikipedia sample skews toward preserved goo.gl/maps links, which is why its headline rate is far lower. One caveat: a shortener can return a 'not found' page with a success status, a soft 404, which this method would miss, so the dead rates here are floors, not ceilings.

• Pew Research, 2024 – 38% of 2013 pages gone by 2023; 54% of Wikipedia pages carry a dead reference link; 18% of tweets gone within three months
• Ahrefs link-rot study – 66.5% of links dead over nine years (74.5% with temporary errors); ~1.3% rot per week; ~2M domains
• Columbia Journalism Review, 2021 – 25% of 2.28M New York Times links inaccessible; 72% of 1998 links dead
• Harvard Law Review, 2014 – ~50% of US Supreme Court opinion links, and over 70% of Harvard Law Review links, dead or changed
• Google Developers Blog – goo.gl shutdown timeline and the August 1, 2025 decision to preserve active and Maps links
• Bitly support – free-plan links "don't expire"; downgrade removes custom-domain redirects and a complimentary domain is not renewed
• USA.gov – 1.USA.gov shortener decommissioned in 2016
• Common Crawl URL index – our primary short-link corpus, 2014-2023 captures across eight shorteners
• English Wikipedia external-links API – our secondary corpus (the goo.gl/maps check)