A short link can still work perfectly and yet no longer send you where it originally did. In our study, 8.6% of still-working short codes now land on a different domain than archives first recorded — the code never changed a character, but its destination quietly did, and most of the time nobody can tell from the outside.
A dead link is honest with you. You click, it fails, you shrug and move on. The quieter, weirder problem is a link that still works — but no longer opens the door it used to. When we compared 3,869 still-working short codes against where archives first saw them pointing, that's what 8.6% of them had done. Pew and Harvard measured whether links die; nobody, as far as we can find, had measured whether they move.
Why a repointed link is sneakier than a dead one
A dead link announces itself. A repointed one keeps collecting clicks from everyone who ever trusted it — in old posts, in citations, on printed QR codes.
The short code hasn't changed one character. The tweet, the PDF, the poster, the footnote all still say bit.ly/xyz. But the door it opens now leads somewhere new — and whoever clicks has no way to know the destination isn't the one the author meant. That's the unsettling bit: the link looks exactly as trustworthy as the day it was made.
Most of it is innocent — which is exactly the problem
We have to be fair to the data: the majority of these changes are legitimate corporate migrations. Real examples straight from our sample:
| Short code | Originally pointed to | Now points to |
|---|---|---|
ow.ly/ksvRV | allfacebook.com | adweek.com |
goo.gl/jnF3qo | anrdoezrs.net | qksrv.net |
goo.gl/fb/… | feedburner.com | seattlegayscene.com |
A media brand gets acquired and its domain redirects to the new owner; an affiliate network rebrands. Harmless! But "harmless migration" and "someone re-registered the expired destination and is now collecting your traffic" look identical from the outside. The exact mechanism that makes the innocent case work is the one that makes the malicious case invisible. That's why you can't judge a short link by its label — the destination is hidden by design.
How to see where a short link really goes
- Expand before you trust. Paste any short link into our link expander to see the full destination chain without opening it.
- Check anything you're unsure about. The link safety checker follows the redirects and flags a destination that's known-malicious.
- Don't chain redirects. Every extra hop is another place the trail can be quietly rerouted.
If you're the one publishing links
The lesson runs both ways. A short link on a domain you own can't be silently repointed by a service you don't control — you're the only one who can ever change where it goes. Want links that never join this graveyard? Create them on in.bio — our links never expire. Every short link stays live for good, and with a free account it lives on a domain you control (not one a company can shut down), you can re-point it any time, and you get real, bot-filtered click analytics on every one.
Part of our study of 134,515 archived short links. We excluded codes whose recorded original was itself a short link and codes now landing on an operator's own error page — method and caveats there. See also the shortener graveyard.