How much of the market is old — and still being re-crawled
Counted on our own crawl archive: how many postings are old, and how many of those we still re-see in the crawler's own pass (40 days this edition).
Key figures
| Measure | ||
|---|---|---|
| Postings older than 90 days | 33.95% | crawl archive, this edition |
| …of those, still re-crawled in the last 40 days | 83.7% | our pub×seen signal |
| Old and still re-crawled (all postings) | 28.42% | |
| Re-crawled in the last 40 days (all postings) | 83.86% | |
| …the same figure inside a fixed 7 days | 0.25% | our crawl pace, not the ads |
Frequently asked
What is the ghost index?
The share of postings older than 90 days (33.95%) and how many of those our crawler still re-sees in its own pass of the corpus (40 days this edition: 83.7%). Inside a fixed seven days the same number is 0.25%, which says more about our crawler's speed than about the ads.
Which sample is this measured on?
Our crawl archive for the current edition, full pass, not a sample. The listing-age page reports the report-pipeline sample separately.
Does an old posting mean the job is fake?
No. We measure listing age and re-crawl activity — we do not claim a posting is fake or already filled.
Press, research and custom cuts: [email protected] · Cite as: DeUnemployment, “Ghost index: old postings still being re-crawled — 2026-11-06”, https://deunemployment.com/data/ghost-index (2026-11-06).
Where this connects. Outside work that defines or studies the measure on this page:
- Ghost jobs in lawmakers' crosshairs: the disclosure bills — HR Executive
- About one in five postings are not real, as platform data was reported nationally — The Independent
Need a different cut? Every figure on this page comes from one index, so we can extract almost any slice on request — a city, a role, an industry, a time window, or a comparison between platforms. Tell us what you need at [email protected] and we will pull it, publish it with its method, and hand you the numbers. All we ask in return is a citation.
More data
- All datasets & measures
- State of Jobs — monthly report
- Data health — what our corpus can vouch for
- Request a custom cut
“Still listed” is a listing-age measure from the source publish date, not a verification that a role is open; link liveness is measured separately. The percentages are the October 2026 edition (full pass, measured 2026-10-06); the index counts are rebuilt by every nightly update, most recently 2026-11-06. Page generated 2026-11-06.