What Wayback Machine measures
The lookup returns every snapshot the Internet Archive holds for your URL, plotted on a calendar, with the full saved page available for each capture date.
How to read your result
Gaps in the calendar mean nobody crawled the page then, not that the page did not exist. Old snapshots often render imperfectly because stylesheets and images were not always captured, though the text is usually intact, and the text is normally what you came for.
What to change first
If you are rebuilding or migrating a site, pull the archived copy of any page you are about to remove. Recovering deleted copy later is far harder than saving it now.
Common questions
- Can I remove my site from the Wayback Machine?
- You can request exclusion by contacting the Internet Archive, though it is handled case by case rather than automatically.
- Why do archived pages look broken?
- The crawler does not always capture every stylesheet, font and image. The HTML and the text survive far more reliably than the design.