Internet Archive & Wayback Machine Scraper 🏛️

Extract historical website snapshots, page content, title tags, metadata, and CDX timeline indexes from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine without needing an API key.

What does Internet Archive Scraper do?

The Internet Archive & Wayback Machine Scraper lets you retrieve historical captures of any website or specific URL. It connects directly to the Internet Archive's CDX index server and Wayback playback system, extracting:

• Historical Snapshots Timeline: Timestamp, HTTP status code (200, 301, 404), MIME type, content length, and digest.
• Direct Wayback Links: Interactive archive URLs and raw playback links without archive banners.
• On-Page Content Diffing: Extracted page titles, meta descriptions, and cleaned content text from past versions.
• Domain Scope Auditing: Supports exact URL, sub-path prefix, or entire domain-level matching.

Why use Internet Archive Scraper?

• SEO & Domain Due Diligence: Inspect expired domains or historical 301 redirect paths before purchasing.
• Brand & Legal Compliance: Gather historical records, past terms of service, and copy changes for legal evidence or auditing.
• Content Recovery: Restore lost blog posts, deleted landing pages, or legacy documentation.
• Competitive Analysis: Track competitor positioning, pricing changes, and offer evolutions over months and years.

How to use

1. Enter the Target URL or Domain (e.g. https://apify.com or example.com/pricing).
2. Set the snapshot Limit (e.g., 20 snapshots).
3. Optionally filter by From Year / To Year and choose a Collapse mode (e.g., timestamp:6 for 1 snapshot per month).
4. Click Start to run the Actor.
5. Export your structured dataset in JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML.

Input Parameters

Field	Type	Description	Default
targetUrl	String	Target domain or URL to audit	"https://apify.com"
limit	Integer	Maximum snapshots to retrieve	20
fromYear	String	Earliest year/timestamp (e.g. 2018)	""
toYear	String	Latest year/timestamp (e.g. 2025)	""
collapse	String	Collapse duplicates (timestamp:6 for monthly, timestamp:8 for daily)	"timestamp:6"
matchType	String	exact, prefix, host, or domain	"exact"
fetchContent	Boolean	Whether to fetch snapshot HTML to extract page title and text	true

Output Example

{
  "timestamp": "20200115120000",
  "formattedDate": "2020-01-15 12:00:00 UTC",
  "originalUrl": "https://apify.com/",
  "archiveUrl": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200115120000/https://apify.com/",
  "rawArchiveUrl": "https://web.archive.org/web/20200115120000id_/https://apify.com/",
  "statusCode": 200,
  "mimeType": "text/html",
  "digest": "XYZ123456789...",
  "contentLength": 45120,
  "pageTitle": "Apify: Web Scraping and Automation Platform",
  "metaDescription": "Turn websites into APIs. Extract data from websites with ease.",
  "textSnippet": "Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping and data extraction..."
}

Pricing & Cost

• Free Tier Compatible: Runs fast on minimal memory (512 MB to 1024 MB).
• No Third-Party API Keys: Uses public Internet Archive infrastructure directly.
• Estimated Run Cost: A 50-snapshot run typically consumes less than $0.002 in Apify Compute Units.

Tips & Best Practices

• Avoid Duplicates: Use collapse: "timestamp:6" when looking for historical trends so you get one representative snapshot per month rather than dozens of repeated captures on the same day.
• Domain-Wide Discovery: Set matchType: "domain" or matchType: "prefix" if you want to discover all historical URLs archived under a company's website.

Disclaimers & Support

This tool interacts with the public Internet Archive CDX server and Wayback Machine API in accordance with archive fair use. Please respect archive.org rate limits. For feature requests or custom automation, contact via Apify Console Issues or reach out to contact@primuez.in.