Live link rate is the share of backlinks you placed or earned that are still live at a set checkpoint after they went up. If a campaign secured 20 links and 18 are still in place and working 90 days later, the 90-day live link rate is 90%.

The formula is:

Live link rate = links still live at the checkpoint ÷ links placed × 100

Live link rate answers a question that most link reports skip: of the links you were shown on launch day, how many are still doing anything months later? A link that disappears after six weeks may have looked fine in the original report and still be worth nothing.

The term is rarely used, and no industry body or tool vendor has published a standard definition. The definition on this page is Search Insider's, and it is written to be strict enough that two people checking the same links get the same answer.

A live link is one that a visitor can click and a search engine can follow to the right page, with the same markup it had when it was placed. Search Insider counts a link as live only if all five of these are true at the checkpoint:

CheckLiveNot live
The linking page loadsReturns the article normallyReturns an error, is deleted, or redirects somewhere else
The link is presentFound in the page's HTMLRemoved or edited out
The link is crawlableA standard <a href> linkTurned into plain text, a script action or an image with no link [3]
The destination is correctPoints to the agreed URLChanged, broken or pointed elsewhere
The attribute is unchangedSame rel value as at placementA followed link changed to nofollow, sponsored or ugc [4]

The crawlability check matters because Google says it "can only crawl your link if it's an <a> HTML element" with an href attribute [3]. A link a site has rewritten into a JavaScript click handler can still look like a link to a visitor while no longer working as one for search.

The attribute check is the one most link reports miss. A link that gains nofollow after placement is still on the page and still clickable, but it is no longer the link that was placed. Count it separately as "live, attribute changed" rather than calling it live.

Calculate live link rate by checking every link from a campaign or order on the same day, against the five checks above, and dividing the live ones by the total placed. Run the check at fixed points rather than whenever someone remembers.

  1. Record each link at placement. Save the linking URL, the destination URL, the anchor text and the rel value on the day it goes live. A saved copy of the page helps settle disputes later.
  2. Choose fixed checkpoints. 30, 90, 180 and 365 days after placement cover the common failure points: early edits, site redesigns and annual content pruning.
  3. Check every link on the checkpoint day. Load the page, find the link in the HTML, and confirm destination and attribute.
  4. Divide and report each checkpoint separately. A 30-day rate of 100% and a 365-day rate of 70% tell a different story than a single blended number.

Report the rate with the count beside it. "95% live at 90 days (19 of 20)" is more honest than "95%", because small campaigns swing heavily on a single lost link.

Backlinks stop being live because pages are deleted, sites are redesigned or abandoned, editors change old articles, and links that should not have been placed get cleaned up. Some of that loss is simply the web decaying.

The background rate of loss is large. Pew Research Center tested about a million web pages sampled from Common Crawl and found that 38% of pages that existed in 2013 were no longer available in October 2023, and that a quarter of all pages from 2013 to 2023 had disappeared [1]. Pew also found at least one broken link on 23% of news pages and 21% of government pages it checked [1]. Pew counted a page as gone only when it returned an error code that clearly showed it was unavailable, so these are conservative figures [1].

On top of that background loss, placed links face risks ordinary links do not:

  • Content pruning. Sites delete or merge old, low-traffic articles, and a link inside a deleted article goes with it.
  • Editorial cleanup. A new editor removes links that look commercial or off-topic.
  • Policy changes. A site that starts marking outbound links nofollow or sponsored changes every link at once [4].
  • Penalty response. Paid links that pass ranking value breach Google's spam policies [5], and a site that receives a warning may strip or qualify them in bulk.
  • Site closure. Thin sites built to sell links can disappear entirely, taking every link with them.

There is also a quieter failure that a live check alone does not catch. Researchers call it content drift: the link still works, but the page around it has changed and no longer says what it did when the link was placed [2].

Live link rate measures whether a link still exists and works, while link indexation rate measures whether Google has indexed the page the link sits on. A link can be live on a page Google never indexed, and a page can be indexed with the link later removed.

MetricQuestion it answersMeasured
Live link rateIs the link still there, crawlable and correct?At fixed checkpoints over months
Link indexation rateHas Google indexed the linking page?Usually in the first weeks after placement
Link pickup rateDid press coverage of a campaign include a link?Per digital PR campaign
Link decayHow are links lost over time across a whole profile?Continuously, across all backlinks

Use live link rate and link indexation rate together. A link that is both live and on an indexed page is the only kind that can do anything for search. Link pickup rate is a different measure for digital PR and does not track whether links survive.

No published benchmark exists for the live link rate of placed backlinks. No tool vendor or industry study reports how many placed links survive at 90 days or a year, so any "industry average" quoted for it is a guess.

What can be said is how to read your own numbers:

  • Below 100% at 30 days is a warning. Links lost in the first month usually point to a site problem, not normal decay.
  • A falling rate between 90 and 365 days is expected to some degree, given how much of the web disappears over time [1]. Steep loss from the same few sites says more about those sites than about decay.
  • Attribute changes clustering on one site suggest that site has changed its outbound link policy.

The most useful comparison is between your own sources. If links from one group of sites are 95% live at a year and links from another are 60% live, that is a vetting decision, not a reporting detail.

Improve live link rate by placing links on sites that are likely to keep their content, and by catching lost links early enough to act. The steps that matter most:

  • Vet sites for stability. Sites with real organic traffic, an active editorial calendar and a history of keeping old articles up tend to hold links. See traffic-validated link and site vetting.
  • Prefer links in content the site values. A link inside a well-read evergreen article is less likely to be pruned than one in a thin post nobody reads.
  • Check on schedule. A link lost at day 25 can often be restored with a polite email. A link lost a year ago rarely can. Link reclamation covers recovering lost and unlinked mentions.
  • Keep your own pages live. A backlink to a page you later delete or move without a redirect is a lost link you caused yourself.

Track live link rate whenever you are paying for, placing or reporting on backlinks, and whenever you need to compare sources. It is the simplest way to tell whether the links in a report are still working for you months later.

Ask anyone supplying links which checkpoints they report on and what they count as live. A provider that only reports links on the day they go up is reporting on day one, not on what you keep.