How Long a Short Link Really Lasts

We pulled two thousand seven hundred and sixty-five short links out of the Common Crawl archives, captured between twenty fourteen and twenty twenty-three, and re-resolved every one of them this July.

Two thousand and seventy-two still worked. Six hundred and ninety-three were dead. One in four.

---

A short link carries two ways to fail rather than one. The destination can rot, the way any web address rots. And the shortener's own redirect has to keep being served. Retire the service, and every link it ever made dies on the same afternoon.

The per-shortener numbers say something on their own. TinyURL came back worst at thirty-six percent dead. Then goo.gl at thirty-three, ow.ly at thirty-two, bit.ly at twenty-six, buff.ly at twenty, is.gd at fifteen, and j.mp at ten.

One caveat we would rather state than bury. A shortener can serve a not-found page with a success status, which our method reads as alive. So these are floors, not ceilings. We also set aside five hundred and seventy-two links that returned a server error or blocked us, because we could not call those dead with any confidence.

For context, the open web is worse. Pew found that thirty-eight percent of pages that existed in twenty thirteen had gone by twenty twenty-three. Ahrefs, across about two million domains, put sixty-six and a half percent of links dead over nine years. A study of two and a quarter million New York Times links found a quarter of them inaccessible, and seventy-two percent of the ones from nineteen ninety-eight gone against six percent of the ones from twenty eighteen.

But the number that changed how I think about this came from the second sample.

We pulled nine hundred and thirty-five short links still cited as references in English Wikipedia and re-resolved those too. Only three point seven percent were dead. A far better result, and the reason is the interesting part. Nine hundred and seven of them were goo.gl slash maps links, which is the exact category Google chose to keep.

Google disabled new goo.gl links back in twenty eighteen, and set the whole service to switch off in August of twenty twenty-five. Then on the first of August that year it reversed part of that, preserving links that were still active in late twenty twenty-four, along with links made inside its own apps.

So put the two samples side by side. The Maps links survived at about ninety-seven percent. The generic goo.gl links in our archive sample died at thirty-three. Same company. Same shortener. Opposite outcomes, decided by a policy call in a meeting.

Which is the finding. A short link's lifespan is not a technical property of the link. It is a business decision made by whoever owns the redirect, and that is rarely you.

Bitly says its free links do not expire, and that is a fair description of its policy today. Its own documentation also notes that after a downgrade you lose redirects on a custom domain, and a complimentary domain is not renewed. Policies are not promises.

So when you print a short link, or put one in something you cannot recall, the question to answer is who holds the off switch. If the answer is a company you are not paying, you have a plan that depends on their goodwill. If the link sits on a domain you own, the off switch is yours.

I am Ankur, and I built Whooshly, a campaign link toolkit you pay for once instead of by the month. Short links, QR codes, UTMs. If you want the code you printed to still work next year, we are at whooshly.co.