See When a Web Page Changed: Wayback History & Text Diff

What it does: shows when a web page changed and what changed, using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, by Print & Plan UK. You give it: page URLs (or a whole site or path), an optional start year, and whether to compare content. You get: one summary per URL with first and last capture, number of content versions, changes per year and days since the last change, plus an optional readable text diff of the latest version against the previous one. Cost per run: $0.004 per URL summarised, plus $0.004 more when you ask for a diff (2 archived versions at $0.002 each), so 100 URLs with diffs cost $0.80; failed lookups are free. Example inputs: https://apify.com/pricing, https://www.python.org/downloads/, https://www.bbc.co.uk/terms.

Use it to track competitor pricing and terms pages over time, research a domain's history before buying it, collect evidence for compliance and disputes, run SEO content-decay audits and do journalism research.

Why this Actor?

Other Wayback Actors list raw snapshots. This one answers the question you actually have: "Has this page changed, how often, and what's different?"

• Change summary per URL: capture count, unique content versions, change count, last change date and per-year breakdowns.
• Content diff: latest version vs the previous different version, or vs the very first capture. Visible text only (scripts and styles stripped).
• Whole-site mode: prefix, host and domain match types summarise every archived URL under a path or site, with the top URLs listed.
• Optional raw capture rows: timestamp, digest, size and snapshot link, if you want the full list.
• Official public CDX API: no scraping tricks, no proxies, polite rate limiting with retries.

Input example

{
  "urls": ["https://apify.com/pricing", "https://www.python.org/downloads/"],
  "matchType": "exact",
  "from": "2023",
  "maxSnapshotsPerUrl": 200,
  "compareContent": "previousVsLatest",
  "includeSnapshots": false
}

Output example (summary item, trimmed)

{
  "type": "summary",
  "url": "https://apify.com/pricing",
  "snapshotCount": 131,
  "firstCaptured": "2023-01-29T23:10:04+00:00",
  "lastCaptured": "2026-10-03T19:35:38+00:00",
  "uniqueContentVersions": 131,
  "changeCount": 129,
  "changesPerYear": {"2023": 19, "2024": 26, "2025": 38, "2026": 46},
  "contentComparison": {
    "mode": "previousVsLatest",
    "before": "2026-10-03T03:43:41+00:00",
    "after": "2026-10-03T19:35:38+00:00",
    "visibleTextChanged": true,
    "similarity": 0.9978,
    "addedLines": ["Browse 80,364 Actors"],
    "removedLines": ["Browse 79,601 Actors"],
    "beforeSnapshotUrl": "https://web.archive.org/web/20261003034341/https://apify.com/pricing",
    "afterSnapshotUrl": "https://web.archive.org/web/20261003193538/https://apify.com/pricing"
  }
}

Note: a "change" means the archived bytes differ (a different content hash). Dynamic pages can change on every capture because of counters or tokens. Use contentComparison.visibleTextChanged and similarity to see whether the visible text really changed.

Pricing (pay per event)

Event	Price
URL history summarised	$0.004
Archived version downloaded (2 per compared URL)	$0.002 each
Capture record (only with "Output every capture record")	$0.0003

A summary plus a content diff costs $0.008 per URL. Failed API lookups are not charged.

FAQ

Why is it slow sometimes? The Internet Archive is a non-profit and rate-limits heavy use. The Actor retries politely, and concurrency is capped at 5 (default 2).

Can I monitor pages going forward? Yes. Schedule the Actor daily or weekly with compareContent: previousVsLatest, then alert on daysSinceLastChange or visibleTextChanged using an Apify webhook or integration.

Does it archive pages? No. It only reads existing public captures.

Data © Internet Archive, used through their public CDX/Wayback APIs. Please respect their terms of use.

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