What happens when the links you paid for go dead?

Ahrefs found that 66.5% of links built between 2013 and 2024 are now dead. Two thirds of everything the industry has ever produced.

That single figure changes how you should think about link pricing. What you are buying is not a link; it is a link for some period of time. A $600 placement that survives four years and a $600 placement that survives eight months are very different purchases at identical prices.

Why links die

Pages get deleted. Content audits, site migrations, publishers going out of business.

Redesigns without redirects. URLs change, the old ones 404, and your link goes with them. Common and entirely unintentional.

Editorial pruning. Publishers periodically audit outbound links and remove ones that look commercial. Guest posts and inserted links are the first to go.

Domains expire or change hands. The new owner has no reason to keep your link.

Paid arrangements lapse. Where a placement was paid for on a recurring basis, some publishers remove it once payment stops — which is worth knowing if your agency was renting rather than buying.

Decay is front-loaded. The first twelve months take the largest share, which is exactly the period a replacement policy would cover if you had negotiated one.

What it costs you

At the market average of $508.95 per link, a programme buying ten links a month for a year spends roughly $61,000. If a third of those are gone within eighteen months, about $20,000 of that has expired — and nothing alerted you.

This is the strongest argument for treating a replacement clause as more valuable than a discount. A 10% price reduction saves $6,100 on that programme. A replacement policy protects three times as much.

What to negotiate

• Monitoring for at least six months after each placement, reported monthly with a live/dead status column per URL
• Free replacement of anything that dies inside the window, with a link of equivalent quality — not merely equivalent DR
• Survival of the window on termination, so leaving in month four does not void it
• Live/dead status in every report, so decay is visible rather than discovered

At least one agency in this market publishes a one-year link guarantee with replacement, so this is not an unreasonable ask — it is an existing market standard that most buyers do not know to request.

Checking it yourself

Whatever the contract says, re-check every placement at 90 days and again at 12 months. A simple spreadsheet of URLs and a crawler is enough. If your live-link rate is below about 85% at 90 days, something is wrong with the site selection rather than with the internet.

Ask about the replacement window using the eleven questions, and make sure it is written into the contract.

Questions