Finding Deleted Content: A Guide to the Wayback Machine and Web Archives
Nothing on the internet is permanent: pages get updated, posts get deleted, companies take their sites down. But a copy often survives somewhere. Web archives let you see what a page looked like in the past. This guide covers the most important archives, how to read a site’s history and how to archive your own findings.
The Wayback Machine
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is the largest web archive, holding copies of billions of pages since 1996. When you enter an address, a calendar shows the dates on which that page was saved.
- Calendar view: The days the page was saved are marked. To find an important change, browse the years first, then the months.
- All pages of a site: Adding
/*to the end of an address (for exampleexample.com/*) lists every archived sub-page. Deleted “Our team” or “Contact” pages can turn up here. - Comparison: Open the same page on two dates side by side to see what changed.
- Save Page Now: Archives a page right now; the easiest way to preserve your findings.
archive.today and other archives
archive.today (archive.ph) saves a snapshot and the text of a page as it is; it can save some pages the Wayback Machine cannot. Many countries also have national web archives, such as Portugal’s Arquivo.pt and the UK Web Archive. These can hold copies of a country’s older sites that the Wayback Machine does not have.
Reading a site’s history
When researching a company or organisation, the older versions of its website say a lot:
- Founding claims: If a company that says “we have been operating for 20 years” has a site first archived last year, that is a red flag.
- Changed details: Old addresses, phone numbers, partners and directors.
- Deleted pages: Removed products, statements or team pages.
- Empty template: A site that was just a stock template a few months ago may show the business is newly set up.
We explain how this is used in due diligence in our due diligence guide.
The limits of archives
- Archives do not save every page; small and new sites are often missing.
- Pages loaded with JavaScript, images and videos may be missing or broken in the archive.
- Site owners can ask some archives to remove their pages.
- The capture date shows when the page was archived, not when the content was written.
Archive your own findings
Archive every page you find important during research right away; it may be gone tomorrow. Put both the original link and the archive link in your report. You can read how to log evidence when writing a report in our guide to writing an OSINT report.