Wayback Machine Snapshot Checker

About the Wayback Machine Snapshot Checker

See the Internet Archive’s history of a website or a page: when the Wayback Machine first and last captured it, how many captures it has in every year and month, and the gaps where nobody captured it. Open a year to list its captures with their HTTP status (every capture, or the first of each day in busy years), jump to the capture nearest a date, and list the archived pages of a whole site with the first and last capture of each.

It is made for two jobs. Before you buy an expired domain or an established website, the history shows what the address used to be, whether it changed hands (long gaps, redirects, a new topic) and how active it was. To recover lost pages, the page list finds what the archive kept of a site, with a link to each page exactly as it was stored, without the Wayback Machine’s toolbar.

Common uses

• Due diligence before buying an expired domain or an established website: what it was, when it went quiet, whether it changed hands.
• Finding the pages of your own site that were deleted or lost in a move, and reading them as they were.
• Checking an SEO migration: when a site moved to https or dropped www., and which old addresses existed.
• Seeing how long a competitor’s site or a page has been online, and how its content changed.
• Finding what a page said around a given date, for research or an article.

Checking an expired domain or a site you want to buy

A registry knows only the current registration (a WHOIS lookup shows it); the archive shows what the address was before:

• Gaps: months or years without a capture often mean the site was offline or the domain had lapsed. The checker lists gaps of six months or more; compare the last capture before a gap with the first one after it.
• A change of owner: a different design, language or topic after a gap, or a parked page of advertisements.
• Signs of spam: pages about unrelated products, casino or pharmacy pages, long lists of links.
• Redirects: open a year’s captures and filter Redirects. A site that redirected for years may have been merged into another one.

Buying an expired domain for its old reputation and filling it with unrelated, low-value pages is what Google’s spam policies call expired domain abuse. The archive keeps only what it captured, so treat the history as evidence to look at, not a verdict, and check the current registration with the WHOIS Lookup.

Recovering lost pages

Archived pages lists the addresses the archive holds under a site or a folder, with the first and last capture of each: 300 per request, and more with Load more when you have a pass. Keep Only pages that loaded on to leave out error pages, and Only HTML pages to leave out images, scripts and styles.

• Open the last capture to see a page as the archive last saw it, or as stored for the HTML exactly as it was saved, without the Wayback Machine’s toolbar or rewritten links.
• Images and other files have captures of their own: switch Only HTML pages off to list them.
• When you rebuild a site, keep its old addresses: send each one to its new address with a 301 redirect (.htaccess Redirect Generator) and test them with the Redirect Checker.

Archived pages belong to whoever wrote them: recover your own content, and ask before you reuse anyone else’s.

How the counts are made

• Captures are the copies the Internet Archive holds of the exact address, made by its crawlers or by people who saved the page. The counts per year and month come from the archive’s own capture summary for that address.
• http and https, with or without www.: one page to the archive, so they count together. A year’s list shows which versions were captured.
• Upper and lower case in the path do not matter to the archive either: /About and /about are one page, and a folder’s page list follows the same rule.
• A year’s list shows every capture when the year has at most 400, and the first capture of each day otherwise.
• Unchanged captures are revisit records: the archive found the same content as at an earlier capture and stored a pointer to it.
• Dates and times are the archive’s own, in UTC.

Where the data comes from

MySmartCoPilot asks the Internet Archive’s public services once per lookup and passes the answer on: the capture summary behind the Wayback Machine’s calendar, the CDX server for lists of captures and pages, and the Wayback Machine itself for the capture nearest a date. Answers are kept for up to an hour, so the same lookup does not ask the archive twice. MySmartCoPilot is not affiliated with the Internet Archive.

Limitations

• Counts and year lists cover the exact address you enter (with its http, https and www. versions); the other pages of a site are under Archived pages.
• The Internet Archive answers slowly at busy times and sometimes asks to try again later. Answers are kept for up to an hour, so a capture made in the last hour may not show yet.
• Page lists come 300 at a time, in the archive’s order (by address). For a heavily archived site (hundreds of thousands of captures) the archive can take more than a minute to list its pages, and sometimes longer than MySmartCoPilot waits; listing one folder of the site is faster.
• Sites excluded from the Wayback Machine show no captures.
• Each visitor can run a limited number of lookups per hour.
• The checker reads the archive; it cannot add, change or remove captures.

Privacy

The address you enter is sent to MySmartCoPilot’s server, which asks the Internet Archive (web.archive.org) about it and passes the capture data back: the archive sees the address, not you. The address and the archive’s answer are kept in a short-lived cache for up to an hour, so the same lookup is not sent twice; nothing else is stored, and the server log records only the kind of request made to the archive, its status code and its time, never the address or your IP address. Links you open go straight to the Wayback Machine.