I Checked Every Link in sindresorhus/awesome — 230 Are Broken

Link rot is the internet's quiet decay. Pages move, domains expire, services shut down — and the links pointing to them silently break. Nowhere is this more visible than in curated lists. I built a tool that checks every link in any GitHub repository's README. When I pointed it at sindresorhus/awesome — the most-starred curated list on GitHub with 340K+ stars — the results were sobering. The Numbers 717 links found. 230 broken. 67.9% health score. That means nearly a third of the links in the most famous awesome-list on GitHub are dead or returning errors. And this isn't unique — link rot accelerates over time. A study by Harvard found that 49% of URLs in court opinions are broken. Why This Matters for Your README If the most maintained list on GitHub has this problem, your project's README almost certainly does too. Every broken link in your README is: A bad first impression — New contributors hit dead links and question maintenance quality A missed redirect — That documentation page