Archive.today

archive.today (also known as archive.is, among other domains) is a web archiving website that saves snapshots on demand. It has support for JavaScript-heavy sites such as Google Maps and X.[3] archive.today records two snapshots: one replicates the original webpage including any functional live links; the other is a screenshot of the page.[4]

In 2025, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began a criminal investigation into the owner of the archive.today's domain name, who it believes is possibly based in Russia. archive.today came under further scrutiny in 2026, when it was discovered that it had been threatening Jani Patokallio and performing a denial-of-service attack on his blog that investigated the website.

History

archive.today was founded in 2012 as a web archive. It allegedly registered its trademark in the Czech Republic in 2013.[5]

Features

Archiving

archive.today can capture individual pages in response to explicit user requests.[22][23][24] Since its beginning, it has supported crawling pages with URLs containing the now-deprecated hash-bang fragment (#!).[25] The website records only text and images, excluding XML, RTF, spreadsheet (xls or ods) and other non-static content. However, videos for certain sites, like Twitter, are saved.[26] It keeps track of the history of snapshots saved, requesting confirmation before adding a new snapshot of an already saved page.[27][28] Once a web page is archived, it cannot be deleted directly by any Internet user.[29] Users can download archived pages as a ZIP file, except pages archived since 29 November 2019,[30] when archive.today changed their browser engine from PhantomJS to Chromium (non-headless).[31] archive.today does not obey robots.txt because it acts "as a direct agent of the human user."[24]

Pages are captured at a browser width of 1,024 pixels. CSS is converted to inline CSS, removing responsive web design and selectors such as attribute. When text is selected, a JavaScript applet generates a URL fragment seen in the browser's address bar that automatically highlights that portion of the text when visited again. Web pages can be duplicated from archive.today to web.archive.org as second-level backup, but archive.today does not save its snapshots in WARC format. The reverse—from web.archive.org to archive.today—is also possible,[33] but the copy usually takes more time than a direct capture.

While saving a page, a list of URLs for individual page elements and their content sizes, HTTP statuses and MIME types is shown. This list can only be viewed during the crawling process. Removing advertisements, popups or expanding links from archived pages is possible by asking the owner to do it on his blog.[34]

Search

The research toolbar enables advanced keywords operators, using * as the wildcard character. Paired quotation marks address the search to an exact sequence of keywords present in the title or in the body of the webpage, whereas the insite operator restricts it to a specific Internet domain.[35] While saving a dynamic list, archive.today search box shows only a result that links the previous and the following section of the list (e.g. 20 links for page).[36] The other web pages saved are filtered, and sometimes may be found by one of their occurrences.[27] The search feature is backed by Google CustomSearch. If it delivers no results, archive.today attempts to utilize Yandex Search.[37]

Bypassing paywalls

archive.today users often abuse the service to bypass paywalls, similarly to the defunct website 12ft.[16][38]

class	skin-invert
screenshot	File:Archive.today Screenshot - 12.19.2024.png
screenshot size	300px
url	archive.today archive.fo archive.is archive.li archive.md archive.ph archive.vn ‡R1R‡
type	Web archiving
language	Multilingual
registration	No
launch date	May 16, 2012‡R2R‡

History

Features

Archiving

Search

Bypassing paywalls

Worldwide availability

Australia and New Zealand

China

Finland

Russia

See also

External links

References