Wikipedia:Archive.today guidance

This page in a nutshell: Archive.today and its domains are deprecated for use on English Wikipedia. New links to the service cannot be added and editors are in the process of removing existing links to it.

In January 2026, archive.today added code into its website in order to perform a distributed denial-of-service attack against a blog.^[1] This code uses the computers of visitors of the site to repeatedly send requests to the blog, with the goal of overwhelming the blog's ability to handle legitimate traffic. The code is still present as of 19 February 2026^[update].^[2] Some common ad blockers, such as uBlock Origin, are currently stopping these malicious requests. It was later discovered that archive.today tampered with archived websites.

Archive.today is an archive site capable of archiving some websites that no other current archive sites can reliably handle. It is linked nearly 700,000 times on English Wikipedia (see stats below). In addition to the DDoS attack and deceptive archive modifications, there is concern about its long-term viability. These concerns were discussed in a request for comment that started on 7 February 2026 and was closed on 20 February. The closing statement is below:

There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links) and remove all links to it. There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users' computers to run a DDoS attack (see [WP:ELNO#3]). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today's operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable. Those in favor of maintaining the status quo rested their arguments primarily on the utility of archive.today for verifiability. However, an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Several editors started to work out implementation details during this RfC and the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today.

Please help remove and replace links to these domain names:

• archive.today – search
• archive.is – search
• archive.ph – search
• archive.fo – search
• archive.li – search
• archive.md – search
• archive.vn – search

There are three main ways to do this:

• Remove archive links to these domains if the original source is still live and has identical content.
• Replace the archive link so it points to a different archive with a copy of the source, such as the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive (https://web.archive.org/), Ghostarchive (https://ghostarchive.org) or Megalodon (https://megalodon.jp).
• Change the original source to something that doesn't need an archive (e.g., a source that was printed on paper), or for which a link to an archive is only a matter of convenience.

Note: Archive.org, run by the Internet Archive, is uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today.

Step-by-step instructions:

• If a citation's original URL is still live, and the citation includes an archive.today URL as a pre-emptive archive (WP:EARLYARCHIVE):
  • Remove the archive URL, archive date, and URL status.
• If a citation's original URL is dead, try repairing it. See WP:DEADREF for detailed advice. Basic steps:
  • Look up the original URL on one of the aforementioned services.
    • If an archive is available there, replace the archive.today URL with the new URL.
    • Update the archive date if needed.
  • If that didn't work, try a web search for the title of the cited source, or for a quote from the text of archived page, because the original website may have moved the content to a different URL. If you find a live URL:
    • Replace the original URL and access date.
    • Remove the archive URL, archive date, and URL status.

If an archive.today URL is in the "External links" section, see WP:ELDEAD for tips.

If you need to access archive.today, you should install a content blocking extension in your browser (such as uBlock Origin) that prevents archive.today from using your computer to send unnecessary web requests when you load its pages.

To highlight references with archive.today archives, copy and paste this stylesheet to your common.css user subpage:

.mw-parser-output .references .reference-text:has(a[href*="archive.today"]), .mw-parser-output .references .reference-text:has(a[href*="archive.is"]), .mw-parser-output .references .reference-text:has(a[href*="archive.fo"]), .mw-parser-output .references .reference-text:has(a[href*="archive.ph"]), .mw-parser-output .references .reference-text:has(a[href*="archive.md"]), .mw-parser-output .references .reference-text:has(a[href*="archive.vn"]), .mw-parser-output .references .reference-text:has(a[href*="archive.li"]) {
	background: var(--background-color-error-subtle, #ffe5e5);
}

The stats page updates monthly on the 15th

• 2026-02-15 - 689,987 links