Wayback Machine History: archived snapshots and changes per URL

Every archived snapshot of a URL in the Wayback Machine, newest first: timestamp, snapshot link, status, content type, size and whether the content changed since the previous capture. Filter on period, one per day or month, or a whole site by prefix. Up to 200 URLs a run. Pay per snapshot.

Why this scraper

• Only delivered results are charged. Inputs that fail come back as clear error records at no cost.
• Straight from the Internet Archive's CDX index, the database behind the Wayback Machine, one request per URL. Measured on the platform: the monthly captures of three sites since January 2024, 34 rows, for under a cent.
• One row per capture with a working snapshot link, the HTTP status and content type the site answered at the time, the size, and two computed columns: whether the content differs from the previous capture (by the archive's own digest) and how many days passed since it.
• collapse turns thousands of captures into one per day, month or year, or into only the captures where the content actually changed, which is what a change history needs.
• matchType prefix or domain lists every archived page under a path or host, which finds old pages a site has since removed.

Who this is for

Put pages or domains in urls (up to 200 per run), choose collapse (default month), matchType (default exact), optionally sinceDate, untilDate, successfulOnly and maxSnapshotsPerUrl. Built for SEO teams checking when a page changed or disappeared, legal and compliance work that needs dated evidence of what a page said, competitor and pricing history, due diligence on a domain's past, and researchers building timelines of a site.

Who this is not for

The Wayback Machine captures what its crawlers and users saved; a page that nobody archived has no history, and comes back as a free NOT_ARCHIVED row. The row says that a capture exists and whether its content changed; it does not contain the page text (the snapshotUrl does). Captures of sites that opted out or were excluded are not in the index. The archive asks for a polite pace, so a run of many URLs takes about a second per URL.

Input fields

Field	Type	Required or default	What it does
urls	list of text	required	One per row, up to 200: a page URL, or a domain for its home page. Use matchType prefix to list every captured page under it.
matchType	text (exact, prefix, domain)	exact	exact for the URL itself, prefix for every URL that starts with it, domain for the whole host including subdomains.
collapse	text (all, day, month, year, change)	month	all for every capture, day, month or year for one per period, change for only captures whose content differs from the previous one.
sinceDate	text		Only captures on or after this date (YYYY-MM-DD). Empty means from the first capture.
untilDate	text		Only captures on or before this date (YYYY-MM-DD). Empty means up to now.
successfulOnly	true/false	true	Only captures with HTTP status 200. Off includes redirects and errors.
maxSnapshotsPerUrl	number	100	Cost ceiling per URL, newest first.

Input example

{
    "urls": [
        "https://www.bbc.com/",
        "apify.com"
    ],
    "matchType": "exact",
    "collapse": "month",
    "successfulOnly": true,
    "maxSnapshotsPerUrl": 100
}

Output example

Field	Type	What it holds
requestedUrl	text	The URL as given in the input, normalised with a scheme.
url	text	The URL the archive actually captured; with prefix or domain matching this differs from requestedUrl.
capturedAt	text	When the Wayback Machine captured the page, in UTC.
timestamp	text	The same moment in the archive's own YYYYMMDDhhmmss form, used in snapshot links.
snapshotUrl	text	The archived copy of the page at that moment on web.archive.org.
statusCode	number	The HTTP status the site answered at capture time; 200 is a normal page, 301 a redirect.
mimeType	text	The content type at capture time, text/html for pages.
lengthBytes	number	The compressed size of the capture in the archive.
digest	text	The archive's hash of the content; equal digests mean identical content.
contentChanged	true/false	True when the content differs from the previous delivered capture, false when identical; empty on the oldest row.
daysSincePrevious	number	Days between this capture and the previous delivered one; empty on the oldest row.

Error codes: INVALID_URL, NOT_ARCHIVED, BLOCKED.

One delivered row looks like this:

{
  "requestedUrl": "https://www.bbc.com/",
  "url": "https://www.bbc.com/",
  "capturedAt": "2026-09-25T00:10:41Z",
  "timestamp": "20260925001041",
  "snapshotUrl": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260925001041/https://www.bbc.com/",
  "statusCode": 200,
  "mimeType": "text/html",
  "lengthBytes": 99161,
  "digest": "2F6WFT5YX4IZCWYRE3HRJBTGJTWBYFKK",
  "contentChanged": true,
  "daysSincePrevious": 24.33,
  "status": "ok"
}

Related actors from steadydata

• internet-archive-search: books, audio, video and software in the same archive
• webpage-to-markdown: the text of a page as it is today
• domain-dns-ssl-report: who owns the domain now and since when

Pricing

Pay per event: one snapshot-listed event per delivered result. No charge for inputs that fail, no separate platform-usage surcharge.

Free Apify plan: this actor delivers up to 25 rows per run for accounts on the Apify free plan, and then stops with a message. That limit is set by us, not by Apify. It exists so the actor keeps paying for itself for the people who do pay. Any paid Apify plan runs it at full size, billed per delivered row, with failed rows never charged.

Reviews: if this actor saves you time, a short review on this page is the one thing that helps most. Ratings are what other buyers look at first, and we have no other way to ask.

FAQ

Is personal data collected? No. The rows are URLs, timestamps and technical properties of archived captures.

How do I see when a page changed? Set collapse to change: the archive then returns only captures whose content digest differs from the one before, and daysSincePrevious tells how long each version lived.

How do I find pages a site has removed? Set matchType to prefix with the site's URL (or domain to include subdomains) and collapse to year: every URL ever captured under it comes back once per year, including ones that no longer exist.

Why do I get fewer rows than expected? Because successfulOnly keeps captures with status 200 by default; switch it off to include redirects and error pages, and set collapse to all for every single capture.

How do I open a snapshot? snapshotUrl opens the archived copy in the browser; replace web/ with web/id_/ in the link for the raw HTML without the archive's toolbar.

What does a run cost when a URL was never archived? Nothing. NOT_ARCHIVED, INVALID_URL and BLOCKED rows are free; only delivered snapshots are charged.

What happens when the source changes? Sources change from time to time; that is the nature of this work. The actor is monitored daily and fixed fast, and while it is broken you are not charged, because only delivered results cost anything.