We Check Every Link We've Built. Here's How Fast Links Die.

For most link builders, the invoice is the last time anyone looks at your link.

Think about how strange that is. The industry sells links as assets, prices them like assets, puts them in reports like assets. Then it walks away and never checks whether the asset still exists. If your accountant treated your equipment this way, you would fire your accountant.

We check. Every placement we’ve ever delivered gets re-verified on a rolling schedule, forever. This piece explains what that system looks like, what it has caught so far, and why “forever” turns out to matter faster than you’d think.

Two thirds of everything this industry built is gone

The best large-scale number we know of comes from Ahrefs’ link-rot research: 66.5% of links built between 2013 and 2024 are now dead. Not devalued, not “diluted.” Dead. The page vanished, the link was removed, or the site itself went away.

Put money against that. A quality editorial link averages around $509 in Reporter Outreach’s State of Link Building survey, and legitimate placements commonly trade at $500 to $900+. A company that bought 100 links over the last decade at those rates, at the industry decay rate, is now holding roughly $34,000 of spend that points at nothing.

Two honest caveats before we lean on that number. First, 66.5% is decay over a decade, not a year; a link bought last quarter is very probably still up. Second, it’s Ahrefs’ data, not ours; our own monitoring history is measured in months, not years. But the direction is not in dispute, and nobody buying links prices in a decade of decay, because nobody selling links brings it up.

”Dead” is six different things, and you can only see four of them

When our checker visits a placement, it doesn’t ask “is the link there, yes or no.” It classifies the placement into one of six states, because links fail in six distinguishable ways:

1. Live. The page loads, your link is in the HTML, the rel attribute is what was agreed. This is the only passing grade.
2. Live but nofollow. The page is up, the link is there, and someone changed the rel attribute after placement. In a browser this is pixel-identical to a live link. It is the failure mode a manual check can never catch, and in our experience it’s the one buyers least expect, because nothing visibly changed.
3. Missing. The page is up and your link is gone. Usually a content refresh: an editor rewrote the section, trimmed the outbound links, and yours didn’t survive. Nobody emails you about this. Why would they?
4. 404. The page itself is gone. Site restructures, category prunes, “content audits” that delete half a blog.
5. Redirected. The host now points somewhere else entirely. Sometimes a rebrand, sometimes a domain sale, occasionally the site quietly becoming something you’d rather not be linked from.
6. Error. The server didn’t answer properly. One error proves little; the same error for days usually resolves itself into one of the states above.

The taxonomy matters because the two states that destroy value invisibly, nofollow flips and quiet link removals on live pages, are exactly the ones a human spot check misses. If you open the page and it loads, you conclude everything is fine. The HTML disagrees.

What checking every link actually takes

Here is our whole monitoring design, because there’s nothing proprietary about diligence:

• Every live placement sits on a rolling schedule. Any link that hasn’t been verified in the last 7 days is due. The checker runs daily and works through whatever is due in batches of 50 until the backlog drains. No placement can go more than a week unobserved, no matter how old it is or how long ago the invoice was paid.
• State changes are flagged the day they happen. A link that was live yesterday and is missing, nofollowed, 404ed, or redirected today gets flagged automatically that same day. Detection doesn’t wait for a monthly report or a client complaint.
• An hourly job sweeps for orphans. Confirmed placements that somehow never got a monitoring row are caught within the hour and enrolled. We built this because the scariest failure mode in monitoring isn’t a missed check; it’s a link that never enters the system at all. An unwatched link is indistinguishable from a healthy one right up until a client finds it dead.

That’s it. That’s the whole system. Notice what it isn’t: it isn’t expensive, it isn’t clever, and it isn’t hard. A liveness check is an HTTP request and an HTML parse. The marginal cost of verifying a link weekly, forever, rounds to nothing against a placement that sold for $495.

Which raises the obvious question about everyone who doesn’t do it.

Our record so far: 2 dropped, 2 caught, 2 replaced

Since we started delivering placements under this system, two links have dropped. Both were detected by monitoring, not by a client. Both were replaced free under our 12-month guarantee. That guarantee has now been invoked twice and honored twice: 2 for 2.

Let’s be honest about what that number is and isn’t. Two drops is a small count from a young portfolio. Ahrefs’ 66.5% took a decade to accumulate; our links haven’t had a decade to rot yet, and some of them will. We fully expect the drop count to grow as the portfolio ages, and we’d be suspicious of any vendor who claimed otherwise.

The claim we will make is about the mechanism, not the count: both drops were found by the system, on the day the state flipped, and fixed before the client ever knew there was a problem. That’s what the guarantee is actually made of. The 2 is incidental; the 2-out-of-2 detection is the product.

The full monitoring and replacement policy is written up on our process page, next to the four things we refuse to do.

Why replacement guarantees without monitoring are theater

Plenty of vendors offer some form of replacement promise. Read the fine print and it almost always depends on one thing: you noticing the link is gone and reporting it within the window.

Walk through the incentives. Once you’ve paid, a dead link costs the vendor nothing and costs you everything. The vendor has no system watching the link, so the guarantee can only trigger if you audit your own purchases, which almost nobody does, which the vendor knows. A guarantee that fires only when the customer does the detection work is a guarantee designed never to fire. It’s not a warranty; it’s a prop in the sales deck.

The test is simple: a replacement guarantee is only as real as the monitoring behind it. If the vendor can’t tell you, unprompted, the current state of every link they’ve ever sold you, then you are the monitoring system, and you’re not being paid for the role.

Spot-audit your vendor this afternoon

You don’t need tooling to check whether your links are alive. You need a spreadsheet, a browser, and about 40 minutes.

1. Pull the placement report. Every URL your vendor has ever billed you for. If they can’t produce this list quickly, that’s your first finding.
2. Sample 20 links. Weight the sample toward older placements; those have had the most time to rot. If you have fewer than 20, check them all.
3. For each URL, check four things:
   • Does the page load? Watch the address bar while it does. A page that “loads” by redirecting to the site’s homepage, or to a different domain, is not a live placement.
   • Is your link in the source? View source (Ctrl+U or Cmd+Option+U) and search for your domain. Don’t trust your eyes on the rendered page; search the HTML. If your domain isn’t in there, the link was edited out.
   • What does the rel attribute say? Look at the anchor tag you found. rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored", or rel="ugc" on a link you bought as a followed editorial placement means the deal changed after you paid, whether or not anyone told you.
   • Is it still the same site? Occasionally the page is fine and the site around it isn’t: new owner, new topic, new neighborhood. Skim the homepage.
4. Send the vendor two questions along with anything you found: “When was each link in my report last verified, and by what?” and “If a link drops in month 9, what happens, and how would you find out?” The first question has exactly one good answer, which is a date within the last week or so. If the answer to the second is any variation of “let us know if you spot anything,” you have your answer about the guarantee too.

In a portfolio more than a couple of years old, industry base rates say a 20-link sample will turn up several failures. If yours comes back clean, good; you’ve spent 40 minutes confirming your vendor is in the minority that holds up. Either result is worth the afternoon.

What monitoring doesn’t catch

In the spirit of not overselling our own system: a liveness check answers “does this link still exist as agreed.” It does not answer “is this link still worth what you paid.”

A page can keep your link and still decay: pruned out of the site’s internal navigation, buried three redesigns deep, bleeding the traffic that made it worth targeting. That link passes every check we run and is still quietly worth less each quarter. We attack that problem at the front of the pipeline instead, by requiring verified traffic on every page before placement, which is documented in what our link building includes. But we won’t pretend monitoring solves it, because it doesn’t. Detecting slow decay on live pages is an open problem on our list, not a feature we have.

The other thing monitoring can’t do is retroactively fix an industry habit. Two thirds of what this industry built is gone, most of it was never watched, and most of it was sold with a straight face as a permanent asset. The fix isn’t complicated. It’s a checker that runs every day and a vendor willing to be measured by it.

We publish our monitoring design and our drop record for the same reason we publish our reply rates and our prices: in a business this allergic to verification, proof is the differentiator. If you want to see what verified data looks like for your own brand before anyone asks you for a dollar, the baseline below is free and takes us a day.