The redirect is the announcement

I keep a list of competitor URLs that no longer exist. It is the most useful list I own, and it started by accident.

A bookmark broke. I clicked a saved link to a competitor's "Teams" plan page and landed on their general pricing page instead. No error, no notice. The plan had not been renamed. It was gone, folded into the tier above it, and the only public record of that decision was a redirect.

Nobody announces a subtraction

Companies write launch posts for the things they add. For the things they remove, they write a redirect rule.

That makes the redirect an unusually honest document. A marketing page can say anything. A redirect can only say one thing: "this used to matter enough to have its own address, and now we would prefer you looked over here." The destination is the interesting part. A product page that now points at a competitor-comparison page tells a different story from one that points at the homepage. The first is a repositioning. The second is a burial.

Three redirects worth checking

It takes ten minutes a month. Paste old URLs into a browser and watch where you land.

• Old plan pages. A tier that redirects to "contact sales" has moved upmarket. A tier that redirects to a cheaper one was not selling.
• Old integration pages. When /integrations/some-partner starts landing on the directory index, that partnership has ended or the connector has been dropped. No changelog will mention it.
• Old feature pages. A feature URL that now resolves to a broader "platform" page usually means the feature lost its owner. It still exists. Nobody is investing in it.

Where do the old URLs come from? Your own bookmarks, old battlecards, archived snapshots, and whatever their sitemap listed last year. The companies that publish a formal deprecations page are rare. Everyone else leaves redirects.

Where the manual version breaks

The weakness is obvious. I only learn about a redirect when I happen to click the link, which may be months after the rule went in. The date is the whole value. "They dropped the Teams plan" is trivia. "They dropped it the week after their enterprise launch" is a finding.

This is the part I hand to Seeto. It watches the public pages on my list continuously and reports each change as a separate event with a date on it. A page that suddenly shows a different page's content is about the loudest change there is. Seeto does not tell me why the page moved. It tells me when, and I do the reading.

The list of dead URLs keeps growing. I have stopped thinking of it as a graveyard. It is the only roadmap a competitor publishes without meaning to.