Your link checker thinks deleted Telegram bots are alive

Delete a Telegram bot and https://t.me/your_deleted_bot keeps returning HTTP 200 with a page that looks completely normal. Every link checker I know of — CI actions, directory scripts, monitoring cron jobs — reports it as healthy forever. If you maintain anything that lists Telegram bots, some fraction of your list is already dead and your checks are telling you it is fine. Reproducing it Pick a username that has never existed: curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} \n " https://t.me/nonexistent_test_bot_77712 # 200 Two hundred. No redirect, no 404, no soft-404 marker in the body that a status check would catch. Where the truth is The status code is useless here, but the Open Graph title is not. I measured four usernames — two live bots, two that do not exist: URL og:title t.me/BookClassBot (live) BookClass t.me/instanavy_bot (live) StoryViewer - anonymous instagram story viewer tool t.me/nonexistent_test_bot_77712 Telegram: Contact @nonexistent_test_bot_77712 t.me/zzz_definitely_not_a_real_bot_9182 Telegram – a new era of messaging A live bot puts its own display name in og:title . A dead one gets one of two Telegram placeholders: Telegram: Contact @<username> , or — if the username is not even syntactically valid — the generic Telegram – a new era of messaging . That is the whole signal. curl -s https://t.me/some_bot | grep -o '<meta property="og:title" content="[^"]*"' The check Standard library only, no dependencies: import re import urllib.request UA = " Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; linkcheck/1.0) " DEAD_EXACT = { " Telegram – a new era of messaging " , " Telegram " } DEAD_PREFIX = " Telegram: Contact @ " def telegram_bot_exists ( url : str ) -> bool : """ True if the bot behind a t.me URL still exists. HTTP status is not usable here: Telegram serves 200 with a placeholder page for usernames that were deleted or never existed. The Open Graph title is what actually differs. """ req = urllib . request . Request ( url , headers = { " User-Agent " : UA }) with urllib .