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The 'Ghost Town' Index of Dead Shopping Mall URLs
Economic reports track the closure of physical shopping centres, but the digital footprint often lingers. We monitor the directory pages of these malls to measure 'digital decay'—the point where a live listing leads to a dead end.
Our index calculates the percentage of tenant URLs that return 404 or DNS errors, alongside the average time since listing updates. This data is gathered by crawling active mall directories and verifying the status of every linked storefront.
This creates a real-time map of commercial atrophy. When a directory remains live while its links expire, it serves as a digital graveyard, reflecting the precise pace at which the physical retail ecosystem vanishes.