wayback

name	wayback
description	Query the Wayback Machine / Internet Archive — search snapshots, check availability, fetch archived page content. Use when user needs historical web pages, archived content, or wants to check if a URL was previously captured.
allowed-tools	Bash, Read

Wayback Machine

Query the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for archived web pages.

When to Use

• User wants to see an old/archived version of a web page
• Checking if a URL/domain was previously active
• Retrieving historical page content
• Searching for all snapshots of a URL
• Comparing page content over time

Requirements

No API key required — Wayback Machine is free and public.

Commands

search — Find snapshots

./scripts/wayback_search search "https://example.com" [-n 25] [--from 20200101] [--to 20231231]

check — Quick availability check

./scripts/wayback_search check "https://example.com"

latest — Fetch latest snapshot content

./scripts/wayback_search latest "https://example.com" [-f json]

get — Fetch snapshot at specific timestamp

./scripts/wayback_search get "https://example.com" -t 20200101120000

Options

Option	Description
-n, --limit	Max results for search (default: 25)
--from	Start date YYYYMMDD
--to	End date YYYYMMDD
-s, --status	Filter by HTTP status (e.g. 200)
--collapse	Dedupe by field (e.g. digest, timestamp:6)
-m, --match	URL match: exact, prefix, host, domain
-t, --timestamp	Snapshot timestamp for get/check
--raw	Return raw HTML instead of extracted text
-c, --max-chars	Max content chars (default: 10000)
-f, --format	Output: json (default) or table

Output Format

search — list of snapshots:

[
  {"timestamp": "20200101120000", "original": "https://example.com/", "statuscode": "200", "mimetype": "text/html", "digest": "ABC123"}
]

latest/get — extracted content:

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "timestamp": "20231215120000",
  "archiveUrl": "https://web.archive.org/web/20231215120000/https://example.com",
  "title": "Example Domain",
  "content": "Extracted page text..."
}

Examples

Search with date range:

./scripts/wayback_search search "https://example.com" --from 20200101 --to 20201231

Search all subpages of a domain:

./scripts/wayback_search search "example.com" --match domain --status 200 -n 50

Deduplicate by content:

./scripts/wayback_search search "https://example.com" --collapse digest

Get page as it appeared on a specific date:

./scripts/wayback_search get "https://example.com" -t 20200615