Short links die for two reasons, and only one is the shortener's fault. A destination page can disappear — ordinary link rot, unavoidable, about 22% of cases — or the shortener itself can fail: a deleted code, a shut-down service, a lapsed domain, about 6% of cases. That 6% is the removable part, and a domain you own removes it.
Blaming shorteners for all link rot is like blaming the road for every crash. Most link rot is just the web being the web — pages move, companies fold, URLs change, and no short link on earth can fix a deleted page. But when we followed 134,515 archived links, we could isolate the slice that only happens because a shortener was in the middle. It's about six points, and it's the six you can delete.
The two ways a short link dies
Every failed short link fails in one of two places. We sorted all of them (full numbers in the link rot study):
The red bar is the entire argument. It isn't link rot in general — it's the extra failure a go-between introduces: a deleted short code, a service that folded, a domain nobody renewed. And it disappears when the redirect runs on infrastructure you own instead of a service that can vanish.
Renting a link vs. owning it
You can see the same story in who survives. Group shorteners by who's actually keeping the lights on:
A generic third-party shortener lost your link five times more often than a platform-owned one. The whole difference is ownership.
A bit.ly link lives exactly as long as bit.ly decides to keep it — through repricing, acquisition, or a quiet change of terms. A link on go.yourbrand.com lives as long as you keep your domain. That's not a features debate; it's a question of who's holding the off switch. (Some of the domains that flipped that switch are in the graveyard.)
So how do you actually keep a link alive?
- Own the domain. For anything meant to outlive a campaign, put it on a custom domain so the redirect depends on your DNS, not someone's business model.
- Use a shortener whose links don't expire. On in.bio, a link made with a free account stays live indefinitely — no pruning, no sunset, no "we're winding this service down" email.
- Keep the destination alive. Six points are the shortener's fault; the other twenty-two are the page's. A short link can't save a deleted page.
- Prefer a 302 for anything you might re-point, so you can repair a broken destination later without reprinting the link — more in link cloaking.
- Never chain shorteners. Each hop is another service that can die.
Doing it with InBio
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. Handed a short link you didn't make and not sure it still points where it claims? Expand it first. Weighing tools? Here's how the shorteners compare.
All figures here come from our study of 134,515 archived links — method and limits are documented there.