The internet is disappearing, a new study has suggested, as web pages and online content is lost.

The web is often thought of as a place where content lasts forever. However, new research shows that vast swathes of it are being lost as pages are deleted or moved.

38 percent of the webpages that existed in 2013, for instance, are now lost. Even newer pages are disappearing: 8 percent of pages that existed in 2023 are no longer available.

Those pages tend to disappear when they are deleted or moved. That happens on otherwise functional websites, the study from the Pew Research Center indicated, rather than happening when whole websites disappear.

The effect means vast amounts of news and essential reference content are disappearing. Some 23 percent of news pages and 21 percent of government websites include at least one broken link, it said, and 54 percent of Wikipedia pages include a link in their references that no longer exists.

Much the same effect is happening on social media. A fifth of tweets disappear from the site within months of being posted.

The study was completed by gathering random samples of almost a million web pages taken from Common Crawl, a service that archives parts of the Internet. Researchers then examined whether those pages continued to exist between 2013 and 2023.