Pew Research — 25% of webpages 2013-2023 are gone; 38% at 10 years

A Pew Research Center analysis found that 25% of all webpages from 2013 to 2023 are already gone, rising to 38% for pages a decade old (S-0052).

These are not specialized scientific webpages; they are the open web. The decay rate is the baseline for any preservation argument involving web-cited references. Citations from the scholarly literature to the open web inherit this decay rate by default, since most are Tier 1 from the perspective of the cited content (one URL, one host, one organizational decision).

The case is empirical input for C-0023. The architectural reading: scholarly citation that depends on continued web availability of the cited content is one organizational decision away (per cited URL) from breaking. Tier 3 alternatives — content-addressed snapshots, Internet Archive captures, distributed mirrors — produce citation durability as a structural property rather than as a hope against the documented decay rate.