According to a 2024 Pew Research study, 25% of web pages that existed between 2013 and 2023 are now gone. Not moved, not archived—gone. An Ahrefs study found that 66.5% of links to websites over a nine-year period were dead.
That article you bookmarked last year? It might already be a 404. That research you did for a project? Half the sources could be gone by next year. Even Wikipedia—supposedly the repository of human knowledge—has 54% of its reference links pointing to pages that no longer exist.
This is called link rot, and it's eating the web from the inside.
Why webpages disappear
Content vanishes for all kinds of reasons:
Sites shut down. Companies fail, projects end, people stop paying for hosting. Mozilla just shut down Pocket after 18 years.
Redesigns break URLs. A site gets rebuilt, old URLs stop working, and nobody sets up redirects.
Content gets removed. Legal reasons, policy changes, someone decides the old stuff isn't worth keeping.
Domains expire. The person who owned that blog ten years ago moved on. The domain is now a parking page or a scam.
Every webpage on the internet exists only as long as someone owns and maintains it.
Bookmarks don't save anything
Most people's solution to "I want to save this" is to create a bookmark in their browser. But a bookmark is just a pointer. It says "go look at this URL." If the content at that URL disappears, your bookmark becomes worthless.
Read-it-later apps like Pocket, Matter, and Readwise are better than simply bookmarking —they cache the content. But your articles still live in someone else's database. When the service shuts down (like Pocket did recently), you have to scramble to export before your collection disappears.
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is heroic—they've saved over 800 billion web pages. But it's not designed to be your personal archive. You can't search it like your own notes. You can't ask it questions. It's a museum, not a library.
What actually works: save the content, not the link
If you want a webpage to exist in ten years, you have to save the actual content. Download it. Store it somewhere you control. Keep it as a file.
This sounds obvious, but almost nobody does it. The friction is too high. You'd have to:
Copy the content somehow
Clean up the formatting
Save it somewhere organized
Remember where you put it
Actually be able to find and search it later
Most people give up at step one and just bookmark the URL.
Why a personal server changes everything
The technical people who run personal servers have always understood the benefits of having your own space on the internet, where your files live. They save articles, documents, notes, and files to a machine they control. They host their own services on top. Their content and tools don’t depend on any company staying in business. It's always there. Backed up. Searchable. Theirs.
The problem is that setting this up has traditionally required real technical skill. Buy a VPS, configure SSH, set up a file system, maybe run Nextcloud or some other self-hosted app. It's a whole thing.
We built Zo to make owning a personal server easy enough for anyone.
How I save articles now
When I find an article worth keeping, I just text my Zo the link.
That's it. Zo fetches the page, extracts the content, converts it to a clean markdown file, and saves it to my Articles folder. If it’s a YouTube video, Zo extracts the transcript automatically.
The webpage now exists as a file I own. It will still be readable in 20 years, long after the original site might be gone. Markdown is a simple, portable, commonly used text format. This means any editor can open it, and any tool can search it.
I can ask my AI about anything I’ve saved. I can ask it to write a summary, or do research and find related articles, or organize my files. I can even ask it to build a custom interactive app to help me explore a particular topic.
A place for your stuff
The deeper point here isn't about articles specifically. It's about having a place for your stuff.
The consumer internet trained us to put everything in apps. Your photos go in Google Photos. Your documents go in Google Drive. Your articles go in Pocket. Your notes go in Notion. And all of it depends on those companies continuing to exist and continuing to offer the service in a form you can use.
A personal server flips this. You have a computer that's yours, always on, accessible from anywhere. Files go there. They stay there. You can use whatever tools you want to access them.
How to get started
If you have a Zo, saving articles is built in. Just paste a URL into the save article action, or tell your AI to save something you're reading. Articles go to your Articles folder as markdown files.
If you don't have a Zo, the principle still applies: find a way to save actual content, not just links. Single-file HTML, markdown, PDF—the format matters less than the fact that you have the content under your control.
The web will keep rotting. Your personal archive doesn't have to.