The public web Australians
are told to rely on

Why this one is a census

Our general link rot report samples the top of the Australian web, because checking a page's links means sending requests to whoever that page links to, and running the full list would be over a million requests made in our name.

The public sector is small enough to measure properly. There are 1,047 .gov.au, .edu.au and .org.au domains in the Tranco top-1 million list published 1 September 2026 (list ID K9QPW), and we checked every one of them — up to 15 links per homepage, using the same engine behind the checker on our homepage.

Which part of the public sector rots fastest

Broken links as a share of links checked, by sector:

What the dead links actually say

This is the most important table on the page. Of 421 links that failed, only 82 were actually missing. Most of the rest were refusals — a server declining an automated request, which says nothing about whether the page exists. Reports that quote a single "broken links" percentage without this split routinely overstate rot by several times.

Not every failed link is a page that disappeared. A 403 is usually a server refusing an automated request rather than a genuinely missing page, and we report it separately rather than folding it into the rot figure. A 404 or 410 is the real thing — a destination that is gone.

Rot they own, and rot they inherited

A broken link pointing at the site's own pages is entirely within the operator's control — somebody moved or deleted a page and nothing was updated. A broken link pointing somewhere else is a third party's decision that the site never got told about.

Most of the dead links here point at pages on the same site — which means most of this is fixable by the people who own it, without asking anyone else for anything.

What they link to that has gone away

Hosts most often on the end of a dead link. We record hosts, never the specific pages — the question is what the public sector points at that no longer answers, not which individual URLs on other people's sites are currently broken.

Why it matters more here

A dead link on a shop is an annoyance. A dead link on a health department, a court, a university enrolment page or a charity's help directory sits between somebody and a thing they were told to go and do. These are also the sites least able to rely on a visitor trying again somewhere else — often there is nowhere else.

The good news in the table above is that public-sector sites are, on the whole, better maintained than the Australian web at large. The bad news is that the failures cluster: a small number of sites carry most of the dead links, and they tend to be the ones with the least resourcing behind them.

Method

Source list

Every .gov.au, .edu.au and .org.au domain in the Tranco list K9QPW of 1 September 2026 — 1,047 domains.

What we fetched

One page per domain: the homepage at https://. We did not crawl deeper. Homepage links are the ones every visitor sees, and crawling entire government sites would multiply the request load on servers funded by the public.

How many links

Up to 15 per page, capped deliberately. Pages with more links than the cap are measured on the first 15, so a site with hundreds of links is judged on a slice of them.

What counts as broken

Any 4xx or 5xx response. Timeouts are counted separately and are not included in the broken figure, because a slow server is not the same as a missing page.

Known limits

A single request at a single moment from a single country. Sites that geo-block, rate limit, or serve differently to automated clients will be misread — which is why 403 is broken out rather than counted as rot. Excluded domains (170 unfetchable, 33 linkless) are not counted as clean.

Data

The full aggregate is published as au-public-sector-report.json under a CC BY 4.0 licence. Attribution to Broken Link Finder with a link back is all we ask.

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