🗂️ Google Cache Viewer — Wayback + Archive Alternative

Google killed their cache view in February 2024. The cache: search operator, the "Cached" link in search results, and the webcache.googleusercontent.com subdomain — all gone. For two decades, Google Cache was how the web retrieved temporarily-dead pages, saw what a site looked like a week ago, and debugged deployment issues.

This actor replaces it with a drop-in lookup against Internet Archive Wayback Machine + archive.today, returning the freshest available snapshot for any URL.

What it does

For every URL you provide, the actor:

1. Queries Wayback Machine's public "closest snapshot" API
2. Queries archive.today's /newest/ endpoint (follows redirect chain)
3. Returns the freshest available snapshot with URL, ISO timestamp, and source
4. Optionally fetches the snapshot HTML and extracts title + 8K char text content
5. Emits a stable content hash for change detection

Example

import requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/nexgendata~google-cache-viewer/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=" + APIFY_TOKEN,
    json={
        "urls": [
            "https://example.com/blog/post-now-deleted",
            "https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/01/some-article"
        ],
        "fetchContent": True
    }
)

for item in r.json():
    if item["found"]:
        print(f"{item['url']}")
        print(f"  Archived: {item['latest_timestamp']} via {item['source']}")
        print(f"  Title: {item['content_title']}")
        print(f"  Preview: {item['content_text'][:200]}...")
    else:
        print(f"{item['url']} — NOT ARCHIVED")

Sample output:

https://example.com/blog/post-now-deleted
  Archived: 2023-11-04T08:22:17Z via wayback
  Title: How We Scaled to 10M Users
  Preview: When we hit 10 million monthly users last fall, we learned...

cURL

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/nexgendata~google-cache-viewer/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls":["https://example.com/"],"fetchContent":true}'

Why this replaces Google Cache

	Google Cache (dead)	This actor
Status	Shut down Feb 2024	Active
Access	cache:URL operator / webcache.googleusercontent.com	HTTPS API
Freshness	Last Google crawl	Last Wayback/archive.today snapshot (minutes to months)
Bulk mode	Manual, one URL at a time	200 URLs/run
Text extraction	❌ (raw HTML)	✅ (8K char cleaned text)
Machine-readable	❌	✅ (JSON)
Cost	Free	$0.003 per URL

Common use cases

• Dead-link recovery — find the last archived version of a page that 404'd
• SEO audits — see what a competitor's page used to say before they rewrote it
• Journalism / OSINT — pull the text of pages that were deleted after publication
• Legal / compliance — document what a contract/terms page said on a given date
• Content monitoring — track if an important page changed (via content_hash)
• Affiliate link repair — bulk lookup of product pages that were removed

Pricing

• $0.005 per run (startup)
• $0.003 per URL looked up (includes content extraction when requested)

100 URLs with content extraction = $0.305. Cheaper than Screaming Frog's archive plugin and no subscription.

FAQ

Q: Does archive.today always have the page? A: Not always. Wayback is broader; archive.today often has freshness Wayback doesn't. The actor queries both and returns the fresher of the two.

Q: What if neither has it? A: Returns found: false. Can't conjure pages that were never archived.

Q: Does this trigger a new archive capture? A: No — read-only. To create a fresh capture, use Wayback's Save Page Now endpoint separately (your request, not ours).

Q: Rate limits? A: Wayback rate-limits shared usage at about 1 request/second per IP. This actor paces accordingly — expect ~1 URL/second.

Q: How old can snapshots be? A: Wayback has archives dating to 1996. For any URL with a public history, you'll likely find something.

Related tools

• Website Content Crawler
• WHOIS Domain Lookup
• SSL Certificate Checker
• DNS Propagation Checker

Try it

🗂️ Google Cache Viewer on Apify

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