Link Rot: What Happens to Your Short Links in Ten Years

You put a short link on 5,000 flyers. Three years pass. Somebody finally scans one.

Where does it go?

Link rot is what happens when a link stops leading where it used to. A short link can rot at either end. The shortener can die, or the page it points at can die, and both happen quietly. Your click count will still go up.

The most famous case is the one nearly everybody reports wrongly.

Did all goo.gl links stop working?

No. Most of them still work today.

Google said in July 2024 that goo.gl links "will no longer return a response after August 25th, 2025". That was the plan for a year.

Then, three weeks out, Google changed its mind. Its 1 August 2025 update says "we've adjusted our approach in order to preserve actively used links".

The same post is blunt about the rest: "All other goo.gl links will be preserved and will continue to function as normal". Only the dormant links went dark, the ones with no activity in late 2024.

The English Wikipedia article on Google URL Shortener still records, as a plain fact, that "existing links stopped working on August 25, 2025". That is wrong.

So we measured it. On 19 September 2026 we pulled real goo.gl links out of live Wikipedia articles, through the MediaWiki API. We asked each one for its redirect, without following it. 52 of the 69 still pointed at their original page.

Read that sample before you quote the number. Links sitting in Wikipedia articles get clicked, and clicked links are exactly the ones Google chose to keep. So 75% is far kinder than the truth for goo.gl as a whole. It proves one thing only: they did not all die.

One door did shut for good. Google closed the goo.gl console on 30 March 2019, and no new goo.gl link has been possible since.

Which old shorteners still work in 2026?

We tested eleven services on 19 September 2026. Two obvious tests both lie, so method matters.

A shortener's home page can return a 404 while its links work fine. Hootsuite's ow.ly does exactly that. And a link can return a clean redirect and still be useless. So wherever we could find a real short link for a service, we asked for it and checked where the redirect went.

One more finding. ow.ly resolves ordinary links, but its image links, the ow.ly/i/ ones, all returned 404. A living service can drop a whole class of its links and say nothing.

How common is link rot?

Pew Research Center measured this in 2024, in a report called When Online Content Disappears. It sampled one million URLs from Common Crawl, about 90,000 a year from 2013 to 2023, and checked them in October and November 2023.

Pew found that 38% of the pages that existed in 2013 were gone a decade later. A quarter of every page in the sample, from any year, had also gone. Even 8% of pages first seen in 2023 were already unreachable.

Pew looked at Wikipedia too. 54% of Wikipedia pages hold at least one dead link in their references. That came from 49,950 English pages and just over a million reference links.

Those figures are about pages, not short links. A short link has two things that can break, not one. So treat Pew's numbers as the floor for a short link, never the measure of one. The other side of that hop is covered in do URL shorteners hurt SEO.

So how long does a link actually last?

You have read that the average web page lives 44 days. There has never been a study behind that.

We traced it. It is one sentence in Brewster Kahle's March 1997 Scientific American article: "estimates put the average lifetime for a URL at 44 days". No sample. No method. No citation.

It gets worse. Kahle's own preprint of that article gives a different number: "the average lifetime of a document is 75 days and then it is gone". Same writer, same year, neither figure sourced.

Two real studies have measured this, and they do not agree either.

Wallace Koehler tracked 361 web pages from December 1996 to May 2003, and published in Information Research in 2004. He put the half-life of a page at about two years, meaning the time for half of a set to vanish. His sample was small and his web is long gone.

Jason Hennessey and Steven Xijin Ge took a bigger, newer sample. They measured 14,489 web pages cited in Web of Science abstracts from 1996 to 2010, and published in BMC Bioinformatics in 2013. Their median lifespan: 9.3 years.

Nobody can hand you one number for how long your link will last.

Koehler found something more useful anyway. His set lost about two thirds of its URLs in the first four years, then held fairly steady. Rot is front-loaded. The links that survive the early years get tougher.

How does a short link actually die?

Four ways. Only the first one is loud.

1. The links get switched off. That is the goo.gl case. You get a 404, and you know at once.
2. The redirect works and goes to the wrong place. su.pr was StumbleUpon's shortener. Every old su.pr link we tested returns a clean 301, straight to the StumbleUpon home page. Every destination is gone, nothing looks broken, and nobody reports it. That is worse than a 404. For why a cached 301 is so hard to undo, see 301 vs 302 redirects.
3. The domain gets parked. tr.im's nameservers now belong to a domain-parking firm. Old tr.im links no longer redirect at all. They serve a page that offers the domain for sale. We looked for anything nastier and found none: this is parking and ad money, nothing more.
4. The shortener lives and the page dies. One link we tested, goo.gl/4LKbi, still redirects perfectly. Its destination sits on wikispaces.com, and that domain has no address record left, so nothing answers. The redirect outlived the thing it pointed at.

Modes 2 and 4 are the dangerous ones. Both are silent, and your analytics still records a happy click.

What does your link really rest on?

A short link rests on a domain. A domain rests on a registry.

bit.ly is a .ly domain, which is Libya's country code. The Libyan registry's own WHOIS shows bit.ly registered through Libyan Spider Network, paid up to May 2032.

The same registry can also close a name for good. Ask it about vb.ly and it replies Domain Status: Prohibited String - Domain Cannot Be Registered. Nobody may register that name at all.

Nothing here predicts trouble for bit.ly. The point is smaller and truer. Your links live on somebody else's domain, in somebody else's registry, under rules you do not set.

Can you recover a dead short link?

Sometimes. The Wayback Machine archives short links, and it keeps the redirect itself, not only the page at the far end.

We pulled a 2017 capture of a goo.gl link in September 2026. It still returned its original 301, aimed at the page it was made for.

Two catches.

It only helps if that exact link was crawled before the shortener died. A link nobody shared is unlikely to be in there.

And the Wayback Machine treats URLs as case-insensitive, while short codes are case-sensitive. Our September 2026 lookup for one code also returned rows for four codes that differ only in capital letters. On a real shortener those are five different links. So open the capture and check it.

The one part you control

Here is the uncomfortable bit. Any shortener can die. Ours included.

A short link is a bet that a company keeps existing and keeps caring about old links. Nobody can promise you ten years. Anybody who does is guessing.

One part of the link is not a bet, though. The domain, if you own it.

A link on links.yourbrand.com/spring belongs to you. If your provider shuts down, you point that domain somewhere else and every flyer still works. A link on the provider's own domain leaves you nothing to move.

That is the strongest reason to use a branded short domain, and it holds with any provider, not just us. Our free plan includes one custom domain, and that is all we will say about ourselves here. Picking the name is its own job, and how to choose a short domain covers it.

The project built to stop this rotted too

In August 2009 a shortener called tr.im announced it was closing, and the scare started something.

That November the Internet Archive launched 301Works.org. Shorteners would place their link databases in escrow. If a member closed, control of its domain would pass to 301Works, and old links would keep redirecting. The announcement counted more than twenty shortening organisations already taking part, and named bit.ly as one of them.

bit.ly deposited data exactly once. A single file of January 2010 links, about 156 MB, uploaded in September 2012. Nothing before, nothing after. The collection is not public, so you cannot look anything up in it.

And the domain? 301works.org has no DNS record today. WHOIS gives a creation date of 24 June 2026 and DropCatch.com as the registrar, the signature of a registration that lapsed and got caught. We checked twice.

The project founded to stop short links from rotting let its own domain rot. That is what ten years does when nobody is watching.

Common questions

Check your own links

If you have short links in print, in slides or in old emails, spend twenty minutes on them. Open each one and see where it truly lands.

clik.so's free plan includes one custom domain and tracks 2,000 clicks a month, with no card needed. If you just want to see where a short link goes before you click, the link checker is free and needs no account.