Reports — original research on the Australian web

The public web Australians are told to rely on

Scanned 2 September 2026

Every Australian government, university and charity domain in the Tranco top million, checked for links that no longer go anywhere. A census, not a sample.

0.7%

of links genuinely gone

844

sites measured

12,228

links checked

Three in ten redirects go nowhere new

Scanned 2 September 2026

Nearly one link in ten answers with a redirect rather than a page. We classified every one to separate genuine moves from avoidable housekeeping.

29.6%

went nowhere new

1,093

redirects classified

8.9%

of links redirect

How much of the Australian web is already broken

Scanned 2 September 2026

We followed links from the homepages of Australia's most-visited websites to see how many still go anywhere. Deliberately sampled, and it says why.

6.9%

of links broken

710

homepages measured

10,045

links checked

How we do this

Every figure in these reports comes from a scan we ran, not from a dataset someone else published. The method is the same each time: take a defined list of domains, fetch one page from each, extract its links, and request every destination — then report what came back.

Three rules keep the numbers honest:

Say what was measured. Where a study covers a whole list we call it a census; where it covers the top of one we call it a sample and explain why.
Exclude rather than assume. Pages we could not fetch, and pages that answered with no links at all, are left out of the totals instead of being counted as clean. That makes every rot figure conservative.
Separate refusals from rot. A 403 is usually a server declining an automated request. It is reported, but never counted as a dead page.

The aggregate data behind each report is published as JSON under a CC BY 4.0 licence. If you want to check our working, or use the numbers, please do — a link back is all we ask. If something looks wrong, tell us and we will look.

We publish hosts, never the specific dead URLs we find on other people's sites. The interesting question is what the web points at that has gone away, not which individual pages are broken today.