Wayback Machine
by Internet Archive · Data service · also known as Internet Archive Wayback Machine, web.archive.org
The Internet Archive's public web archive for browsing historical snapshots of web pages, with Save Page Now, Availability, CDX and Memento APIs
Overview
The Wayback Machine is the Internet Archive's public archive of the web, holding captures of web pages collected since 1996 and allowing anyone to browse a URL as it appeared on a given date. Beyond the browser interface it offers several programmatic entry points documented by the Archive: an Availability API that returns the closest archived snapshot for a URL and optional timestamp, a Memento-protocol interface for time-based negotiation, a CDX server for querying and filtering capture indexes in bulk, and Save Page Now for requesting a fresh capture, which also exists as a browser extension and an authenticated API.
Researchers use it to recover deleted or changed pages, to document citations with stable archived links, and to study how sites evolve; developers call the CDX API to enumerate captures of a domain before downloading them. The service is free to use and funded by donations and partnerships.
Limits: coverage is uneven and depends on past crawls and user submissions, sites can request exclusion, dynamic or login-protected content is often incomplete, heavy API use is rate-limited, and replayed pages may miss assets or scripts.
Editorial note on uncertainty. source_model is recorded as proprietary because the hosted service is operated by the Internet Archive; much of the underlying software (e.g. the Wayback replay stack) is open source.
Capabilities
- Browse archived snapshots of any URL by date
- Save Page Now on-demand capture
- Availability API for the nearest snapshot
- CDX server for bulk capture queries
- Memento protocol support
Typical workflows
- Cite a stable archived version of a web source
- Recover content from a page that disappeared
- Enumerate all captures of a domain with the CDX API
Strengths
- Free and open to everyone
- Decades of historical coverage
- Standards-based (Memento) programmatic access
Limitations
- Uneven coverage and excluded sites
- Incomplete replay of dynamic content
- Rate limits on APIs and captures
Prerequisites
- None for browsing; account for authenticated Save Page Now API
Who it is for
- Researchers and journalists
- Developers needing historical page data
- Anyone verifying past web content
Alternatives & comparison
- ArchiveBox
Self-hosted, open-source web archiving tool that saves URLs as HTML, PDF, screenshot, WARC, readable text and media snapshots with a web UI and CLI
Open sourceOpen source - Browsertrix
Webrecorder's browser-based web archiving system, available hosted or self-hosted, that crawls sites with real browsers into signed WACZ files replayable with ReplayWeb.page
Open sourcePaid - Common Crawl
Nonprofit open repository of petabyte-scale web crawl data since 2008, published as WARC, WAT and WET files on AWS Open Data with URL and columnar indexes
MixedFree
Sources & verification
Primary sources consulted for this record. Claims are tied to the fields each source supports; the automated link checker re-verifies every URL on a schedule.
- Official documentationchecked Nov 1, 2026
- Official documentationchecked Nov 1, 2026
- Official sitechecked Nov 1, 2026
- Confidence
- High
- Reviewed
- Nov 1, 2026
- Links
- Verified · Nov 2, 2026