Wayback Archive

The Wayback tool queries the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for the snapshot history of a URL, then presents the captures in a structured timeline with diff and density visualisations.

It is the toolkit's "what did this page used to say" tool. Indispensable for investigative reporting where a site has quietly changed text, removed a page, or rebranded.

What you get

For any URL:

The capture timeline

Each row in the timeline shows:

• The date and time of capture (UTC).
• The HTTP status the archive observed at capture time.
• The page title at capture time.
• A direct link to the captured page on the Wayback Machine.

For a URL with hundreds of captures, the table sorts and filters by:

• Date range.
• Status code.
• Whether the title changed compared to the previous capture.

Title change column

A third column highlights when the page title changed between captures. For investigative work:

• A title change from "Acme Corp - About Us" to "404 Not Found" tells you when the page was taken down.
• A title change from one product brand to another tells you when a rebrand happened.
• Repeated title changes between two values tell you the page is dynamic enough that the archive caught different states on different days.

Snapshot diff

Pick any two snapshots from the timeline and see the text diff. The diff is text-only (HTML structure is stripped) so you see actual content changes, not template noise.

For investigative reporting, this is the central feature. A press release that quietly changed wording last Thursday is now visible to the reader of your report.

Capture density chart

A small inline SVG chart shows snapshot counts per month (or per year for very long-lived URLs). Density tells you:

• High density windows — the page was popular or the archive was paying attention. Often correlates with major events.
• Low density windows — the archive lost interest, or the page was unstable.
• Sudden cessation — the URL stopped being archived. Often the URL stopped existing.

Status-code distribution

Aggregate counts of HTTP statuses across all captures. A page with 500 captures of which 480 are 200 and 20 are 404 had a few outage moments. A page that flips to 404 after a date never came back.

URL-key alternates

The Wayback Machine treats different query strings as different URLs. The "alternates" view shows every query-string variant the archive holds for the same path. Useful when:

• The site uses session-bearing URLs.
• The page has multiple parameter-driven variants.
• You want to see captures of "the same page" in the broader sense.

Pivots

Sources

• The Internet Archive Wayback Machine CDX API.
• The Wayback Machine's snapshot endpoints (for the diff fetches).

Every source is named on the result.