What it takes for us to say an app is dead, and how to fix it if we are wrong.
It takes several failed checks and several days. Both, never either. One bad afternoon never changes anything, because DNS resolvers lie and CDNs have bad days.
Below are the exact numbers for each case, how fast an app comes back once it is answering again, and what to do if we have this wrong about yours.
Two things, and both have to hold.
If the domain stops resolving: 2 checks and 3 days. Across the checks we have run, not one app that failed DNS recovered on the next check, so this is the signal we trust most, and three days is still required.
If the domain resolves and the site is erroring: 3 checks and 14 days. A 500 is a bad deploy far more often than an ending, so the bar is a fortnight of sustained failure.
A redirect to another domain that sticks: 2 checks and 7 days. Slower than the other endings on purpose, because a misconfigured redirect somebody undoes next week would otherwise leave an ending on your listing that never happened.
We record it as what we saw, and your listing names the address it goes to. We do not call it an acquisition. Plenty of redirects are a rebrand, a move to a better address, or two products becoming one, and plenty of real acquisitions never redirect at all because the product keeps running where it always did.
Two clean checks and no waiting period. We check again the next day rather than waiting for the product's usual turn, so a site that comes back is live again within a day. We would far rather do that too eagerly than leave a working product marked dead.
If our checks stop for a month, your app stays exactly as it was. Time passing is never evidence on its own: only a check that actually ran and failed counts towards anything.
An abandoned product returns a perfectly healthy homepage forever. A liveness check cannot tell that from a product shipping weekly, so it never claims to. Live means the site answered, and nothing more than that.
Check whether you are blocking us first. A 401, 403, 429 or 451 changes nothing, so it cannot have caused this, but a bot rule that answers with a 503 looks like an outage from where we are standing.
Then use Report an error on the listing. It needs no account and it goes to a person. State is the one thing an owner cannot set directly, on purpose: it is what makes the label worth anything to anyone reading it. Two clean checks fix it either way.
Correcting something that is wrong has the rest.