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Web Archives

Tools for accessing historical snapshots of web content via the Internet Archive.

wayback

Check whether a URL has been archived by the Wayback Machine and retrieve the closest available snapshot.

Parameter Type Required Default Description
url str Yes — The URL to look up in the Wayback Machine.
timestamp str No (latest) Target timestamp in YYYYMMDDhhmmss format to find the closest snapshot.

Returns: JSON with the closest available snapshot URL and its capture timestamp. Returns an empty archived_snapshots object if the URL has not been archived.
Auth: None.

Usage examples

Check if a page exists in the archive: 

wayback(url="https://example.com/page")

Find the closest snapshot to a specific date: 

wayback(url="https://example.com/page", timestamp="20200101000000")

Browsing archives directly

To browse all snapshots for a URL, visit https://web.archive.org/web/*/URL directly in a browser. The API only returns the single closest snapshot to the requested timestamp.