Link rot is what happens to every collection of links over time: pages move, sites close, domains expire, and the links pointing at them break. Readers hit 404s, citations stop supporting claims, and search engines see a page full of dead ends. The older and more link-heavy a page is, the worse it gets — and nobody notices until someone complains.
Fixing it is a two-part job: find the dead links, then decide what to replace each one with. Web archives make the second part easy, because for most dead links there's an archived copy of what used to be there.
Where link rot hurts most
- Evergreen blog posts and guides that link to tools, studies and examples.
- Documentation linking to third-party APIs and specs.
- Academic and legal references, where the claim depends on the source.
- Wikipedia and wiki pages.
- Resource lists and link directories.
- Your own site after a migration — internal links to URLs that no longer exist.
Step 1: Collect the URLs
Get the links into a list. For one article, copy them from the page; for a site, use its sitemap; for a bibliography, paste the reference list. In Web Archive Viewer's Bulk lookup you can paste up to 1,000 URLs, load a sitemap, or grab all the links on the current page with one button.
Step 2: Check live status and archive availability together
A plain broken-link checker tells you which links are dead. That's only half the answer. Bulk lookup checks both at once and returns, for every URL:
| Column | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Live HTTP status | 200 fine · 301/302 redirected · 404/410 gone · 5xx server error |
| Availability per archive | Which archives hold a copy you can link to |
| Summary | How many are dead, how many of those are recoverable |
| CSV export | Everything in a spreadsheet for your editor or ticket |
Step 3: Decide what to do with each dead link
| Situation | Best fix |
|---|---|
| Page moved (redirect or new URL found) | Update the link to the new address |
| Page gone, archived copy exists | Link to the archived capture closest to when you first linked it |
| Page gone, no archive | Find an alternative source, or remove the link and adjust the text |
| Your own page gone | Restore it from the archive or add a 301 redirect |
Pick the capture closest to the date your article was published — that's the version you actually referenced. The Snapshot by date tool shows the closest capture to any date in each archive, and Wikipedia-style citations keep both the original and archived links (see citing archived pages).
Step 4: Prevent it next time
- 01Archive as you link. When you cite something important, archive it and keep the capture link.
- 02Re-check on a schedule. Run your most important pages through a bulk check every quarter.
- 03Redirect on migrations. Before you retire URLs, export every archived URL of your domain with a full URL inventory and map them.
Limits worth knowing
Bulk lookup is part of Pro and checks up to 1,000 URLs per run and 500 URLs a day, which covers a large article archive or reference list each day. Live checks never download page bodies and refuse private or local addresses, so a pasted list can't be used to probe your network.
FAQ
What is link rot?
Link rot is the gradual breaking of hyperlinks as the pages they point to are moved, deleted or taken offline. A related problem, content drift, is when the link still works but the page now says something different.
How do I fix broken links with the Wayback Machine?
Find an archived capture of the dead URL from around the time you linked it and replace the link with the capture's full URL (or add it as an archive link next to the original).
How do I check a whole website for dead links?
Load the site's sitemap into a bulk checker, or crawl it with a link checker. Bulk lookup accepts a sitemap and checks each URL's live status and archive availability.