Internet Archive & Wayback Machine Scraper

Search Internet Archive and check Wayback Machine snapshots. Access 800B+ archived pages, books, movies, audio. Search items, get metadata, or check URL archive history. No API key needed. For SEO, OSINT, legal, and research.

Use cases

• Recover a page that no longer exists via the Wayback Machine
• Audit how a competitor's site or pricing changed over time
• Source public-domain texts, audio, or video
• Preserve evidence of published web content with timestamps
• Build a historical dataset from archived snapshots

Input

Parameter	Type	Required	Default	Description
mode	string	Yes	"search"	Operation mode: search the archive, get item metadata, or check Wayback Machine availability Allowed: search, getMetadata, waybackSearch.
query	string	No	"artificial intelligence"	Search query (supports Lucene syntax, e.g. 'title:"open source" AND date:[2020 TO 2024]')
identifier	string	No	""	Archive.org item identifier (for getMetadata mode, e.g. 'nasa-apollo-17')
url	string	No	""	URL to check in Wayback Machine (for waybackSearch mode, e.g. 'https://example.com')
timestamp	string	No	""	Target timestamp for Wayback lookup in YYYYMMDDhhmmss format (optional, returns nearest snapshot)
mediatype	string	No	""	Filter search results by media type Allowed: ``, texts, movies, audio, software, image, data, web, collection.
maxResults	integer	No	50	Maximum number of results to return (1-10000)

Example input

{
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "artificial intelligence",
  "identifier": "",
  "url": "",
  "timestamp": "",
  "mediatype": "",
  "maxResults": 10
}

Output

The exact fields depend on the mode you run. This is real output from an actual run of this Actor:

{
  "identifier": "KASU_91_9_FM_20180720_210000",
  "title": "KASU 91.9 FM [91.9 KASU] : July 20, 2018 04:00PM-05:00PM CDT",
  "creator": "",
  "date": "2018-07-20T00:00:00Z",
  "description": "",
  "mediatype": "audio",
  "downloads": 27,
  "archiveUrl": "https://archive.org/details/KASU_91_9_FM_20180720_210000",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-06T15:23:17.298Z"
}

Field	Type
identifier	string
title	string
creator	string
date	string
description	string
mediatype	string
downloads	number
archiveUrl	string
scrapedAt	string

The dataset also ships a preset table view (Results), so the key columns are readable straight away in Apify Console, and exportable to JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML.

How to run it

In Apify Console — open the Actor, fill in the input form, click Start, then download the results from the Dataset tab.

With the JavaScript client

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });

const run = await client.actor('cloud9_ai/internet-archive-scraper').call({
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "artificial intelligence",
  "identifier": "",
  "url": "",
  "timestamp": "",
  "mediatype": "",
  "maxResults": 10
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

With the Python client

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient('YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN')

run = client.actor('cloud9_ai/internet-archive-scraper').call(run_input={
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "artificial intelligence",
  "identifier": "",
  "url": "",
  "timestamp": "",
  "mediatype": "",
  "maxResults": 10
})

for item in client.dataset(run['defaultDatasetId']).iterate_items():
    print(item)

With the API — POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/cloud9_ai~internet-archive-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN with the input JSON as the body.

Notes and limits

• No API key, account, or login is needed — just the input above.
• maxResults caps how much a single run collects, which is also what caps the run's cost.
• Requests are paced and failed requests are retried automatically, so runs stay inside the source's rate limits.
• Only publicly available data is collected. How you use the output is your responsibility, including the source's terms of use and any applicable data-protection law.

Support

Found a bug, or need a field that isn't in the output? Open an issue on the Issues tab of this Actor in Apify Console. Issues there are read and answered.

License

Apache-2.0