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Cover image for Wayback Machine API — Get Historical Snapshots of Any Website
Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

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Wayback Machine API — Get Historical Snapshots of Any Website

#webdev #history #api #archive

The Internet Archive's CDX API lets you find every saved version of any website.

The API 

https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=apple.com&output=json&limit=20
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Returns: timestamp, original URL, status code, MIME type, file size, digest.

What You Can Do

  • See how a site looked 10 years ago — useful for brand research
  • Track competitor changes — when did they redesign?
  • Find deleted content — pages that are now 404
  • Verify claims — what did a company say before they edited it?

Archive URL Format 

https://web.archive.org/web/20250101120000/https://example.com
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Timestamp format: YYYYMMDDHHmmss

Collapse by Date

Use collapse=timestamp:8 to get one snapshot per day instead of every crawl.

Apple.com Example

My scraper found 4,817 snapshots for apple.com across 6 sitemap partitions.

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