Link Rot Statistics: How Fast the Web (and Your Affiliate Revenue) Decays
The headline numbers on link rot: Pew Research Center found 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible by 2023, and 23% of news pages contain at least one broken link. Research on New York Times articles (Harvard, 2021) found roughly a quarter of deep links already rotten. Affiliate links decay faster than ordinary links because they carry extra failure layers — the tracking hop, the campaign, and the commercial relationship — with industry measurements putting several percent of live affiliate links in a decayed state at any given moment.
The web-wide baseline
Pew Research Center's 2024 study "When Online Content Disappears" is the cleanest large-scale measurement: 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were inaccessible ten years later, and even among pages from 2023 itself, 8% were already gone by the time of the study. Rot is not an old-web problem — it starts immediately.
The same study found 23% of news webpages and 21% of government webpages contain at least one broken link, and that over half of Wikipedia articles have at least one dead link in their references section.
Deep links rot fastest
A 2021 Harvard-affiliated study of links inside New York Times articles found about a quarter of deep links (links to specific pages rather than homepages) were already dead — and the deeper and more specific the link, the faster it rots. This matters directly for affiliates: affiliate deep links are, by definition, maximally specific links to individual product pages.
Why affiliate links decay faster than the baseline
An ordinary link has one failure surface: the destination. An affiliate link stacks four: the wrapper (shortener or vanity redirect), the network tracking hop, the destination page, and the commercial relationship — a closed program kills a link whose every URL still resolves. Industry measurements of affiliate link rot (including Impact.com's research on deep link decay) consistently land in the single-digit-percent range of live links affected at any moment, with far higher rates in content over two years old.
From validation work across affiliate content, the pattern that recurs: actively maintained link inventories run 1–3% broken at any given time, while unaudited back catalogs — the years-old YouTube descriptions and blog archives that still earn — run several times higher, because rot compounds unattended.
The revenue math
Take a conservative 3% rot rate on a creator with 800 published affiliate links averaging $6/month each when healthy: 24 dead links × $6 = $144/month leaking, $1,700+/year — perpetually, because new links keep aging in. The insidious part is distribution: rot concentrates in the oldest, most evergreen content, which is precisely the content still pulling search traffic.
Sources
The public research this page draws on:
- ▸Pew Research Center (2024), "When Online Content Disappears" — 38% of 2013's pages inaccessible; 23% of news pages with broken links.
- ▸Zittrain, Bowers & Stanton (2021), "The Paper of Record Meets an Ephemeral Web" (Harvard) — ~25% of NYT deep links rotten.
- ▸Impact.com research on affiliate deep link decay — single-digit percentages of affiliate links affected at any time.
- ▸Afterlink validation observations (qualitative) — maintained inventories vs unaudited back catalogs.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of affiliate links are broken right now?
For actively maintained sites, typically 1–3% of links at any moment. For unaudited content more than two years old, meaningfully higher — rot compounds when nobody is checking.
Is link rot getting better or worse?
The drivers are structural and stable: sites restructure, products churn, programs migrate. Pew found even months-old pages already disappearing, so there is no evidence of improvement — only better detection.
Can I cite these statistics?
Yes — cite the primary sources listed above for the web-wide numbers, and this page for the affiliate-specific framing. A link back is appreciated.
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