Data study · June 15, 2026
We probed 9,992,781 of the world’s most popular domains and labelled each one alive, redirect, blocked, or dead. The real dead figure is 14.1% — not the 27.6% a naive crawl reports, because most of “dead” is just blocking you.
14.1%
of the 9,992,781 probed top domains are genuinely dead — gone from DNS or refusing every connection.
8.9%
answer but block bots
1.1%
of responders are parked
Homepage-level reachability from a datacenter IP — a lower bound.
14.1%
of the 9,992,781 probed domains are genuinely dead — no DNS, no connection, nothing answers. That is the real dead-web figure, not the 27.6% a naive crawl reports.
8.9%
answer but block automated clients (403/429/challenge) from a datacenter IP — alive, just not to a bot. Naive scans count these as dead.
10.3%
of all domains no longer resolve in DNS — the dominant cause of true death, 1,027,492 domains gone dark.
33%
.cn is the deadest common TLD — institutional and cheap-registration TLDs rot fastest, well above the .com baseline.
Every probed domain, by outcome
A naive 2024 crawl of the same top-10M list reported 27.6% dead. Probe honestly — separating genuine death from anti-bot blocking and answered errors — and the real figure is 14.1%. Here is where the difference goes.
DNS failure, anti-bot 403s, 404/5xx and timeouts all lumped together
No DNS, connection refused, or nothing accepts a connection
Where the “dead” really goes
The same domains, probed by an honest bot and by a browser-like client (real Chrome TLS/JA3). Where the browser column is lower on dead/blocked, the site is reachable — the bot just wasn't let in.
| Probe arm | Probed | Alive | Blocked | Dead | Dead % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Polite bot | 9,992,781 | 7,657,422 | 891,517 | 1,412,544 | 14.1% |
| Reachability (browser) | 9,997,315 | 7,743,245 | 819,599 | 1,412,889 | 14.1% |
| China (.cn) | 33% |
| India (.in) | 25.8% |
| United States of America (.us) | 22% |
| Brazil (.br) | 20.9% |
| Spain (.es) | 16.6% |
| Japan (.jp) | 15.6% |
| United Kingdom (.uk) | 15.3% |
| Australia (.au) | 15% |
| Russia (.ru) | 14.8% |
| France (.fr) | 14.5% |
| Canada (.ca) | 14.1% |
| Italy (.it) | 13.5% |
| Poland (.pl) | 13.1% |
| Sweden (.se) | 11.6% |
| Switzerland (.ch) | 9.8% |
| Netherlands (.nl) | 9.7% |
| Austria (.at) | 8.6% |
| Germany (.de) | 7.6% |
| Czechia (.cz) | 7.2% |
The gap between 27.6% and 14.2% is mostly a measurement choice. A crawler that stops at the first response sees only 45.9% return a clean 200; follow the redirects and read the bodies, and 71.9% are alive. Here is where every first response ends up.
| 200 OK → Alive | 4,584,611 (46.3%) |
| 3xx redirect → Alive | 2,677,304 (27%) |
| No response → Dead | 1,413,013 (14.3%) |
| 403 / 429 → Blocked | 410,511 (4.1%) |
| 3xx redirect → Blocked | 365,368 (3.7%) |
| 404 → Alive | 236,685 (2.4%) |
| No response → Blocked | 105,222 (1.1%) |
| 5xx → Alive | 85,728 (0.9%) |
| 3xx redirect → Redirect | 31,267 (0.3%) |
| 3xx redirect → Dead | 1,775 (0%) |
Split the 10 million by popularity and the dead rate climbs more than 20× — from 0.8% in the top 1,000 to 16.1% past rank 5 million — while blocked runs the other way, peaking at the popular head.
99.8% of dead domains sit below rank 100,000. The popular top-100K — where most web traffic lives — is only 2.2% dead, so weighted by attention the dead web nearly disappears:
share of the top 10M that are dead
the popular top-100K is only 2.2% dead
Search, filter by outcome, switch the probe arm, and sort. The full dataset is on GitHub. Click a domain to see how each arm fared.
| Rank | Domain | Outcome | Reason | Status | Final URL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 201 | www.npmjs.com | Blocked | forbidden | 403 | https://www.npmjs.com |
| 202 | gitlab.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://about.gitlab.com/ |
| 203 | www.bloomberg.com | Blocked | forbidden | 403 | https://www.bloomberg.com |
| 204 | example.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://example.com |
| 205 | www.deezer.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.deezer.com/us/ |
| 206 | www.example.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.example.com |
| 207 | lh5.googleusercontent.com | Alive | client_error | 400 | https://lh5.googleusercontent.com |
| 208 | discord.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://discord.com |
| 209 | www.gnu.org | Blocked | timeout | — | — |
| 210 | mailchimp.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://mailchimp.com |
| 211 | calendly.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://calendly.com |
| 212 | www.goodreads.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.goodreads.com |
| 213 | www.wix.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.wix.com/ |
| 214 | kpmg.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://kpmg.com/xx/en.html |
| 215 | www.surveymonkey.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.surveymonkey.com |
| 216 | developers.facebook.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://developers.facebook.com |
| 217 | hbr.org | Alive | ok | 200 | https://hbr.org |
| 218 | learn.microsoft.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ |
| 219 | workspace.google.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://workspace.google.com |
| 220 | blog.youtube | Alive | ok | 200 | https://blog.youtube |
| 221 | studio.youtube.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://accounts.google.com/v3/signin/identifier?continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fsignin%3Faction_handle_signin%3Dtrue%26app%3Ddesktop%26hl%3Den%26next%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fstudio.youtube.com%252F%26feature%3Dredirect_login&dsh=S1998365293%3A1781519223613687&hl=en&passive=true&service=youtube&uilel=3&flowName=WebLiteSignIn&flowEntry=ServiceLogin&ifkv=AcDsRvzVcRWbb_FWztMf07ETbpQ1_fQEaepEd5Yn0S-LrOArK5J3uXHSdYDxwjzyOei0zYZl2Ox1Sg |
| 222 | zoom.us | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.zoom.com |
| 223 | www.amazon.co.uk | Alive | ok | 202 | https://www.amazon.co.uk |
| 224 | www.mckinsey.com | Blocked | timeout | — | — |
| 225 | adsense.google.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://adsense.google.com/start/ |
| 226 | cdn.shopify.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://cdn.shopify.com |
| 227 | www.nature.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.nature.com |
| 228 | apple.co | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.apple.com/ |
| 229 | schema.org | Alive | ok | 200 | https://schema.org |
| 230 | www.netflix.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.netflix.com |
| 231 | slack.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://slack.com |
| 232 | www.businessinsider.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.businessinsider.com |
| 233 | search.google.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.google.com/ |
| 234 | www.reverbnation.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.reverbnation.com |
| 235 | www.eff.org | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.eff.org |
| 236 | code.visualstudio.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://code.visualstudio.com |
| 237 | link.springer.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://link.springer.com |
| 238 | www.playstation.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.playstation.com/en-us/ |
| 239 | tools.ietf.org | Alive | ok | 200 | https://authors.ietf.org/ |
| 240 | foursquare.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://foursquare.com |
| 241 | maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com |
| 242 | www.nintendo.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.nintendo.com/us/ |
| 243 | www.whitehouse.gov | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.whitehouse.gov |
| 244 | gmail.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://accounts.google.com/v3/signin/identifier?continue=https%3A%2F%2Fmail.google.com%2Fmail%2Fu%2F0%2F&dsh=S-1860389665%3A1781524299961336&emr=1&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fmail.google.com%2Fmail%2Fu%2F0%2F&osid=1&passive=1209600&service=mail&flowName=WebLiteSignIn&flowEntry=ServiceLogin&ifkv=AcDsRvxkwGvEmtWgyXo_dHwvX-GlrLVOnlAc5cbDjeXPwwHOCVaNzkmp-tBYfRJJwI1llYIs4YPOOw |
| 245 | www.whatsapp.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.whatsapp.com |
| 246 | www.dailymotion.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.dailymotion.com |
| 247 | scholar.google.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://scholar.google.com |
| 248 | www.theatlantic.com | Alive | ok | 200 | https://www.theatlantic.com |
| 249 | rutube.ru | Alive | ok | 200 | https://rutube.ru/ |
| 250 | lit.link | Alive | ok | 200 | https://lit.link |
We probe a top-popularity domain list HTTPS-first from a datacenter IP, following redirects, and label each domain alive, redirect, blocked, or dead by the evidence the probe captures — a final HTTP status, or a transport error plus whether a raw TCP connect still succeeds. A served 404, a 5xx, or a Cloudflare 52x is alive (the host answered); a 403/429 or anti-bot challenge is blocked; only no DNS, a refused/reset connection, or nothing accepting a connection is dead. Every domain is probed twice — as a polite bot and as a browser-like client (real Chrome TLS/JA3) — and the full per-domain dataset is open.
This measures whether the domain itself still resolves and answers — a different question from Pew Research’s 2024 link-rot study (25% of pages from 2013–2023 are gone; 38% of 2013 pages) and Ahrefs’ link-rot study (66.5% of links have rotted), which measure broken links insideliving pages. It is also not the “dead internet theory” — that is a claim about AI-generated content, not domain reachability.
Cite this
Crawlora (2026). Dead-Web Index 2026. 14.1% of 9,992,781 top domains are genuinely dead; 8.9% answer but block automated clients. https://crawlora.net/dead-web-index.
14.1% of the top 9,992,781 domains are genuinely dead — about 1,412,544 sites that no longer resolve in DNS or refuse every connection. That is far below the often-quoted "27.6% of the web is dead," which counted anti-bot blocks and answered errors as death.
A dead site never answers — no DNS record, or nothing accepts a TCP connection. A blocked site is alive and answering, it just refuses an automated client (a 403, 429, or anti-bot challenge). 8.9% of the top web (891,517 sites) is blocked, not dead — a distinction naive crawlers miss.
No. The dead internet theory is a claim that AI-generated content and bots have replaced human activity on the living web. This index measures the opposite and concrete thing: how many domains have gone completely dark and unreachable — DNS gone, connection refused, server gone.
Earlier top-10M crawls counted three non-dead things as dead: anti-bot 403/429 blocks, 404/5xx pages served by a live server, and domains a single flaky DNS resolver failed to look up. Classifying honestly — dead means genuinely unreachable — brings the real figure to 14.1%.
.cn has the highest death rate among common TLDs at 33%. Institutional TLDs like .gov and .edu also rank high — matching Pew Research's finding that government and reference pages suffer the worst link rot.
Anti-bot systems (Cloudflare, DataDome, and others) serve a 403 or a challenge to a datacenter IP while letting a real browser through. A matched browser TLS/JA3 fingerprint reaches the site where a naive bot is blocked — which is exactly why this index probes every domain twice, as a polite bot and as a browser-like client.
8.9% of the top web answers but blocks a naive bot. Crawlora escalates from a plain request to a real browser fingerprint only as far as a site demands, and bills on success — so you reach the live web that the 14.1% genuine dead doesn’t include.