What happens when a short link expires (and how to avoid finding out)

An expired link does not redirect anywhere, and it does not pretend it never existed. It answers HTTP 410 Gone with a small page naming the destination's domain and saying the owner can restore it.

That choice is deliberate at three levels: the visitor learns what happened, crawlers drop the URL faster than they would a 404, and any monitoring you have can tell a retired link apart from a mistyped one.

The five ways a link stops serving

State	HTTP status	What the page says	Reversible
Expired	410	Where it pointed, and that the owner can restore it	Yes, if it is in an account
Click limit reached	410	The owner set a maximum number of visits	Yes, raise or clear the cap
Disabled after a report or safety check	410	It was reported or failed a check, with a way to contest	Only after review
Paused by the owner	404	The owner has switched it off for now	Yes, instantly
Scheduled, not live yet	404 with a Retry-After header	The date and time it goes live	It starts on its own

Paused answers 404 rather than 410 on purpose. A pause is temporary by definition, and telling the world a URL is permanently gone when you intend to bring it back next week is the kind of small lie that costs you search visibility.

What sets the expiry date

Three things, and the earliest one wins.

Anonymous links get 30 days. Every link created without an account carries a fixed lifetime from creation, which is the trade for not needing a sign-up.

Your plan sets a policy. Paid plans have no lifetime limit — links live until a date you choose or forever. Where a plan does have a lifetime, it caps what you can set: asking for "never" on a plan with a policy gets you the policy, not never.

You set a date, or a click cap. In the link editor, under Schedule and limits. A cap is the underrated one — a link that stops after 200 clicks is a genuinely useful thing for a limited offer, and it fails closed rather than quietly overrunning.

Claiming, and what it does to the date

An anonymous link's claim token is stored in the browser that created it. Sign in from that browser and the link moves into your workspace, keeping the same code, and its expiry is recalculated against your plan's policy rather than the 30-day anonymous rule.

1. 1

   Create the link, note the expiry shown under the result

   The homepage tells you the date in plain language rather than making you work it out.

2. 2

   Sign in from the same browser, before 30 days pass

   Claim tokens are handed over automatically on your first sign-in. Different browser, cleared site data, or a private window and they are gone.

3. 3

   Open the link in the dashboard and set the expiry you actually want

   Clear it for links that live on printed material; set a date for campaigns that genuinely should stop.

4. 4

   Check it once, later

   Put the link through a checker a week before any date you have set, so an expiry you scheduled a year ago does not surprise you.

Why codes never come back

When a link is deleted, its code is written to a retired list and is never issued again, on that domain, to anyone. The namespace loses a code; the internet gains a guarantee.

The reason is straightforward. Short codes appear in messages, forum posts, printed material and archives for years after the link stops working. If a retired code could later be reissued, anyone who noticed a dead code in an old message could claim it and take over the traffic still arriving at it. Some of that traffic comes from people who trusted whoever sent them the link.

The same logic applies to expiry. An expired link still holds its code, so restoring it is a date change, not a recovery operation.

The rule worth adopting

Set expiry on campaign links and never on evergreen ones. A link with a date is a link that fails safely when a promotion ends. A link on a menu, a card, a sign or a package should have no date at all, because the thing it is printed on will outlive every plan you have for it.