the.com/link rot

means The slow decay by which hyperlinks stop working because the pages they point to have moved, changed, or vanished entirely.

from A late-20th-century coinage built from 'link' (the hypertext connection, a term from the web's earliest days) plus 'rot,' borrowed from organic decay — the same word used for wood or teeth. The phrase caught on as the web matured and people noticed old pages crumbling into dead ends; by the 2000s librarians and archivists were using it as a technical term, worried enough to build projects like the Wayback Machine specifically to fight it.