Link rot: why your bookmarks stop working and how to keep them

Link rot is what happens when a saved URL stops returning the page you saved. It happens to every bookmark list that is older than a few years, and the only reliable defence is keeping your own copy of the page.

This guide covers what causes link rot, what the best measurement says about how common it is, and what you can do about it with free tools and with a bookmark manager.

What link rot is

A bookmark stores an address, not a page. The address can keep working while the content changes, or stop working entirely, which is the usual meaning of link rot. You click and get a 404 page, a parked domain, or a page about something else.

The bookmark itself is fine. The page it points to is gone.

Why it happens

Most link rot has dull causes:

• A site is redesigned and old URLs are not redirected.
• A company shuts down, or a service is retired. Mozilla's closure of Pocket in 2025 is an example, and we covered it in Pocket shut down: where should your reading list go now.
• A domain expires and is not renewed.
• An article is edited, merged or deleted by its publisher.
• A page moves behind a login or paywall.

None of these needs anyone to be careless with your data. The page was never yours.

How common is it

Pew Research Center measured it. In its study When Online Content Disappears, Pew took a random sample of just under a million pages from Common Crawl, roughly 90,000 pages per year from 2013 to 2023, and checked whether each still existed.

It found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer available in October 2023, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023. Across all pages from 2013 to 2023, 25% were no longer accessible. Pew counted a page as inaccessible only if it returned one of nine error codes, and notes that some sites block automated access, so its figures may understate the problem.

That is a general sample of the web, not of bookmarks. Pages people choose to save are not the same as a random page. Still, it is the best published yardstick, and it matches what most people see when they open a ten-year-old bookmark folder.

Why bookmarks are especially exposed

Browser bookmarks give you no warning. A dead link looks exactly like a live one until you click it. By then the page may have been gone for years, and you cannot tell what it said from the title alone.

Because a bookmark holds only a URL and a title, a dead one gives you almost nothing to search for elsewhere. If you wrote a note when you saved it, you have more to go on.

What you can do about it

Check your links

A periodic check finds dead links while the trail is warm. You can do this by hand with a link checker script, or let a tool do it. On Pro, tinykoi checks your links about once a month and flags the ones that stopped working, with a link to the archived copy. You can also filter your library to show only broken links.

Keep your own copy

A copy is the only fix that works after the original is gone. You have several options. In short: save the page as a PDF, use the Internet Archive's Save Page Now, or use a bookmark manager that keeps a copy for you.

Add context when you save

Write a one-line note on why you saved the page, and add a tag. If the page disappears, those words let you search for a replacement. tinykoi supports tags, notes and favourites on every plan.

What an archived copy gives you in tinykoi

On Pro, tinykoi keeps a copy of every page you save, so it stays readable after the site changes or goes away. You can filter to pages with an archived copy.

Plan limits are worth knowing:

• Archived copies are a Pro feature. On the free plan you keep the title, cover, tags and your notes, but not a full copy.
• Free plans do search the full text of the pages you save, so you can find a page even when you have forgotten its title.
• If you leave Pro, archived copies are deleted 30 days later. Export before you go.
• tinykoi says in its terms that not every page can be archived. Some sites block fetching, and some pages need a login. Keep your own export of anything you cannot lose.

Pro costs $3 a month or $24 a year. See pricing for what each plan includes.

A simple routine

A routine that takes five minutes a month:

1. Run a broken link check, or open the broken filter.
2. For each dead link, open the archived copy if you have one.
3. If there is none, search the title on the Internet Archive and decide whether the bookmark is worth keeping.
4. Delete the ones you no longer need.
5. Export your library as HTML or CSV and keep the file somewhere you control.

Save it before it goes

Link rot is easiest to beat at the moment you save a page. The free plan needs no card, and you can compare the free and Pro features on the features page before deciding whether archiving is worth $3 a month to you.