What is the Wayback Machine?

The Wayback Machine is the Internet Archive's collection of web pages saved over time, going back to 1996. Its crawlers, and anyone who uses its Save Page Now button, capture pages as they looked on a given day, so you can still read a page that changed or disappeared.

Tool description

Enter a URL or domain and press Find snapshots. You get:

  • First snapshot: when the Wayback Machine first captured the page, a good hint of how long a site has existed
  • Latest snapshot: when it was captured most recently
  • Under each date, the URL as it was captured and the HTTP status it answered with (a 301 or 302 means the page redirected that day)
  • Buttons that open the first and latest snapshot, or the calendar of every snapshot, in a new tab

The lookup runs on our server with the Internet Archive's official CDX Server API, so the site you look up is never contacted.

AI assistants connected to the Rapid Tool Set MCP server can run the same lookup as wayback_machine_snapshot_checker.

Tips

  • The archive looks up the exact page: example.com finds the home page, example.com/blog the blog page. http and https, and a leading www., count as the same page.
  • A page with no snapshot may still be archived under a slightly different address; open all snapshots to search around it in the calendar.
  • Domain registration dates (see the Domain Age Checker) and the first snapshot can differ by years: a domain may have been registered long before anyone put a site on it, or registered again after it expired.