Wayback Machine Scraper: Snapshots, Archived URLs and Page History

Get data from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for any website. You can list every snapshot of a page over time, extract every URL the archive holds for a domain, or find the capture closest to a date. You can also download the archived page text.

It uses the official Wayback CDX index and needs no login or API key. Requests are polite (2 at a time) and it waits and retries when the archive is busy.

What you can do

• Page history (snapshots mode). Every capture of a URL, oldest first, with the date, HTTP status, MIME type, content digest and size. By default, captures with identical content are skipped, so you get only real changes. You can also thin the list to at most one capture per hour, day, month or year.
• Archived URL extractor (urls mode). Every unique URL archived under a domain, host or path, with its first capture. Use it to recover deleted pages, rebuild old sitemaps, plan SEO redirect maps after a migration, find old PDFs or run OSINT research.
• Closest snapshot (closest mode). One capture per URL, nearest to a date you choose, for example "what did these 500 homepages look like on 2019-01-01?"
• Archived page text (optional). Add the title, meta description, H1, language, word count, link count and clean plain text of each archived HTML page.
• Filters. Date range (2015, 2020-06, 2024-01-31 or "2 years"), status codes (200, 301, 404 and others), MIME types (text/html, application/pdf), "URL contains" text, per-input and total caps.

Pricing

Pay per event, with no subscription:

	This Actor	Typical alternatives
Per 1,000 snapshots or archived URLs	$0.30	$1 – $5
Per 1,000 archived pages with text	+$1.00	$3 or more
Per run start	$0.0005	up to $0.01

Inputs with no captures cost nothing beyond the start fee. Page text is charged only when a page was actually downloaded. If you set a spending limit, the run stops cleanly when it is reached.

Input examples

Yearly history of a page:

{ "urls": ["https://www.apple.com/iphone/"], "frequency": "year", "statusCodes": ["200"] }

All archived blog URLs of a domain:

{ "urls": ["example.com"], "mode": "urls", "urlContains": "/blog/", "mimeTypes": ["text/html"], "maxResultsPerUrl": 5000 }

Homepages as they were on a given date, with text:

{ "urls": ["nytimes.com", "bbc.co.uk"], "mode": "closest", "closestTo": "2010-01-01", "includeContent": true }

Output

{
  "url": "http://www.nytimes.com/",
  "capturedAt": "2010-01-01T17:32:18Z",
  "timestamp": "20100101173218",
  "statusCode": 200,
  "mimeType": "text/html",
  "archiveUrl": "https://web.archive.org/web/20100101173218/http://www.nytimes.com/",
  "rawArchiveUrl": "https://web.archive.org/web/20100101173218id_/http://www.nytimes.com/",
  "digest": "GIIGQHYAG2VIF4ZLPEW4ZOSZHJQQLYXY",
  "sizeBytes": 25811,
  "contentChanged": null,
  "urlKey": "com,nytimes)/",
  "inputUrl": "nytimes.com",
  "mode": "closest",
  "title": "The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia",
  "metaDescription": "Find breaking news, multimedia, reviews & opinion on Washington, business, sports, movies, travel, books...",
  "language": null,
  "h1": null,
  "linksCount": 419,
  "wordCount": 2406,
  "text": "The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia\nLog In\nRegister Now\n...",
  "textTruncated": false,
  "contentFetched": true,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-22T05:25:20.000Z"
}

archiveUrl opens the capture in the Wayback viewer. rawArchiveUrl returns the original archived file with no Wayback toolbar. In urls mode, capturedAt is the first time that URL was archived. Inputs with no results, or with errors, are listed in the FAILURES key-value record.

Tips

• In urls mode a bare domain (example.com) matches all subdomains, and a URL with a path (example.com/docs) matches everything under that path. You can override this with Match.
• Domain-wide scans of very large sites with filters can take a minute per 5,000 rows, because the archive index scans them server-side. Narrow with a path, a date range or a cap for faster runs.
• Results run oldest to newest. To get recent captures only, set From date (for example "1 year").

Use via API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/best_apis~wayback-machine-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls":["example.com"],"mode":"urls","maxResultsPerUrl":1000}'

FAQ

Is this legal? It reads the Internet Archive's public CDX index and public archived copies, the same data anyone can view at web.archive.org. It doesn't log in or collect personal data. Respect the copyright of archived content when you reuse it.

Why do some captures have status 301 or 404? The archive also records redirects and error pages. Filter with statusCodes: ["200"] to keep only real pages.

Can I save a page to the archive? No. This Actor only reads existing captures.

Something broke? Open an issue on the Issues tab and it will be fixed quickly.