TechFlow reports, citing a study by Pew Research Center which found that online content remains "fleeting," with one in four web pages disappearing entirely over the past decade.
Researchers randomly sampled around one million web pages from Common Crawl—an internet archiving service that regularly collects snapshots of websites at different points in time. They selected samples annually from 2013 to 2023 and checked whether these pages were still accessible today.
Data shows that about 38% of web pages existing in 2013 are now unavailable, compared to 8% for pages from 2023. Across all web pages collected between 2013 and 2023, 25% were inaccessible by October 2023. This unavailability falls into two categories: 16% of pages had disappeared while their domain names remained active; for another 9%, even the domain names no longer existed.
