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Wayback Machine APIs

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine supports a number of different APIs to make it easier for developers to retrieve information about Wayback capture data.

The following is a listing of currently supported APIs. This page is subject to change frequently, please check back for the latest info.

Updated on September, 24, 2013

Wayback Availability JSON API

This simple API for Wayback is a test to see if a given url is archived and currenlty accessible in the Wayback Machine. This API is useful for providing a 404 or other error handler which checks Wayback to see if it has an archived copy ready to display. The API can be used as follows:

http://archive.org/wayback/available?url=example.com

which might return:

{
    "archived_snapshots": {
        "closest": {
            "available": true,
            "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20130919044612/http://example.com/",
            "timestamp": "20130919044612",
            "status": "200"
        }
    }
}

if the url is available. When available, the url is the link to the archived snapshot in the Wayback Machine At this time, archived_snapshots just returns a single closest snapshot, but additional snapshots may be added in the future.

If the url is not available (not archived or currently not accessible), the response will be: 

{"archived_snapshots":{}}

Other Options

Additional options which may be specified are timestamp and callback
  • timestamp is the timestamp to look up in Wayback. If not specified, the most recenty available capture in Wayback is returned. The format of the timestamp is 1-14 digits (YYYYMMDDhhmmss) ex:

    • http://archive.org/wayback/available?url=example.com&timestamp=20060101

    may result in the following response (note that the snapshot timestamp is now close to 20060101): 

    {
    "archived_snapshots": {
        "closest": {
            "available": true,
            "url": "http://web.archive.org/web/20060101064348/http://www.example.com:80/",
            "timestamp": "20060101064348",
            "status": "200"
        }
    }
}

  • callback is an optional callback which may be specified to produce a JSONP response.

Memento API

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is also fully compliant with the Memento Protocol The Memento API provides additional interfaces for querying snapshots (eg 'Mementos') in the Wayback Machine. The Availability API is partially based on the Memento APIs.

Here are some specific examples of Memento support in the Wayback Machine

Wayback CDX Server API

The CDX Server is another API which allows for complex querying, filtering and analysis of Wayback capture data. If you are looking for more in depth information about Wayback machine data, please take a look at the CDX server API.

The latest documentation on the CDX server can be found at: Wayback CDX Server @ GitHub