Definition

Link rot

Link rot is the gradual failure of published hyperlinks over time as their destinations are deleted, moved, or restructured. For affiliate links it includes commercial failure too: a link whose program closed "rots" even though the URL still loads.

General web studies consistently find large fractions of older links dead — Pew Research found 38% of webpages from 2013 were no longer accessible a decade later. Affiliate links rot faster than average because they have more failure layers: wrapper, network hop, destination page, and the commercial relationship itself.