archive.today (also known as archive.is, among other domains) is a web archiving website that saves snapshots on demand. It has support for JavaScript-heavy sites such as Google Maps and X. archive.today records two snapshots: one replicates the original webpage including any functional live links; the other is a screenshot of the page.
The website has come under scrutiny from many governments starting in the late 2010s, including bans in China and Russia and in 2025 U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) subpoenaed a domain registrar to identify the owner of archive.today's domain name.
History archive.today was founded in 2012 as a web archive. It allegedly registered its trademark in the Czech Republic in 2013. The site originally branded itself as archive.today, but changed the primary mirror to archive.is in May 2015. It began to deprecate the archive.is domain in favor of other mirrors in January 2019. According to the archive.today blog, the website had saved about 500 million pages by 2021, 700 terabytes in total size.
In July 2013, archive.today began supporting the API of the Memento Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Due to budget constraints at LANL, the Memento Project was disestablished in September 2025. Archive.today was one of the last major active users of the Memento protocol following the project's downsizing. The closure of the Memento infrastructure at LANL in September 2025 came amid a broader period of increased scrutiny for the service.
The Russian independent media outlet Mediazona uses the site to preserve social media profiles and posts of Russian servicemen killed in the Russo-Ukrainian war, as part of its Russia 200 project, a named database of confirmed Russian military casualties compiled jointly with the BBC Russian Service and a team of volunteers. Individual profile pages on 200.zona.media link to snapshots of social media posts by relatives, obituaries in local media, and other open-source evidence used to verify each death.
In early 2023, a team of researchers at the University of Amsterdam identified archive.today as the most-used open-access archiving service among fact-checking organisations, based on the 's dataset on the Russo-Ukrainian war.
In August 2023, Jani Patokallio published an investigation on his blog Gyrovague regarding archive.today's funding sources and the founder's identity. The founder tends to believe that the Patokallio family’s increased interest is linked to how the archive.today website is being used in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war.
On 30 October 2025, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) subpoenaed archive.today's domain registrar, Tucows. The subpoena stated its purpose was to identify the owner(s) of the archive.today domain name, and that it was part of a criminal investigation conducted by the FBI, the nature of which was not disclosed. The Catalan daily Ara interpreted the action as part of a campaign to selectively criminalize anonymous digital archives reliant on micro-donations (such as Anna's Archive, eliminated by Google from its search results), even though industrial datasets used for training large language models (such as the Common Crawl, financed by OpenAI and Anthropic) also fail to compensate content creators and owners.
In November 2025, the DNS provider AdGuard DNS reported that it had been pressured by a French organization calling itself Web Abuse Association Defense (WAAD) to block archive.today and its mirror domains. WAAD alleged that archive.today had refused to remove child sexual abuse material since 2023, invoking French LCEN law to demand action. AdGuard DNS contacted archive.today directly and reported that the flagged content was promptly removed upon notification, and that archive.today stated it had never received prior complaints about those URLs. AdGuard's investigation found that WAAD was a recently registered association with minimal public presence, and described the complaints as suspicious, noting evidence of possible impersonation of a real French lawyer in prior similar complaints sent to other companies. AdGuard announced it would file a criminal complaint with French police.
On 8 January 2026, Patokallio's hosting provider Automattic notified him that it had received a GDPR complaint from a person identifying herself as Nora. The complaint alleged that the 2023 Gyrovague investigation "contains extensive personal data… presented in a narrative that is defamatory in tone and context." After Patokallio submitted a rebuttal, Automattic sided with him and left the post up. Subsequent investigation suggested that Nora was likely an appropriated identity—the name belonged to either a real person or a trademark of a clothing brand, whose only connection to archive.today had been a prior content takedown request. On 10 January 2026, the archive.today webmaster sent Patokallio an email asking him to temporarily remove the 2023 post; when Patokallio declined, the DDoS attack began several days later.
On 14 January 2026, it emerged that archive.today had modified its CAPTCHA page to discretely send repeated requests to Gyrovague, thereby causing visitors to unwittingly contribute to a DDOS attack against the blog. A Tumblr account seemingly associated with archive.today had recently posted several public criticisms of Patokallio. Emails released by Patokallio show archive.today requesting the temporary removal of his report and later threatening him with AI pornography. On 20 February 2026, the English Wikipedia banned links to archive.today, citing the DDoS attack and evidence that archived content was tampered with to insert Patokallio's name. The decision was made despite concerns over maintaining content verifiability while removing and replacing the second-largest archiving service used across the Wikimedia Foundation's projects. The Wikimedia Foundation had stated its readiness to take action regardless of the community verdict. Patokallio expressed his satisfaction with the outcome.
During the community discussion, editors discovered that archive.today's operator had tampered with archived snapshots of webpages. In captures of a blog post related to Nora, the operator had replaced instances of Nora with "Jani Patokallio", including in comment fields that previously read "Comment as: Nora". The alterations were subsequently reverted. The discovery was cited as a key factor in the blacklisting decision, as it undermined the premise that archived snapshots were faithful reproductions of the original pages.
This was not the first time Wikipedia had restricted links to archive.today. In 2013, the community blacklisted archive.is, citing concerns about botnets, linkspamming, and the opaque manner in which the site was operated. The decision was overturned in 2016 following a new request for comment, and archive.today was removed from the spam blacklist. At the time of the 2026 ban, the site was the second-largest archiving service used across all Wikimedia Foundation projects, with over 695,000 links spread across approximately 400,000 pages.
Features
Archiving archive.today can capture individual pages in response to explicit user requests. Since its beginning, it has supported crawling pages with URLs containing the now-deprecated hash-bang fragment (). The website records only text and images, excluding XML, RTF, spreadsheet (xls or ods) and other non-static content. However, videos for certain sites, like Twitter, are saved. It keeps track of the history of snapshots saved, requesting confirmation before adding a new snapshot of an already saved page. Once a web page is archived, it cannot be deleted directly by any Internet user. Users can download archived pages as a ZIP file, except pages archived when archive.today changed their browser engine from PhantomJS to Chromium (non-headless). archive.today does not obey robots.txt because it acts "as a direct agent of the human user."
Pages are captured at a browser width of 1,024 pixels. CSS is converted to inline CSS, removing responsive web design and selectors such as :hover and :active. Content generated using JavaScript during the crawling process appears in a frozen state.JavaScript-generated loading animation of Dailymotion video https://archive.today/20200121182128/https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3sexy8 appearing in a frozen state HTML class names are preserved inside the old-class attribute. When text is selected, a JavaScript applet generates a URL fragment seen in the browser's address bar that automatically highlights that portion of the text when visited again. Web pages can be duplicated from archive.today to web.archive.org as second-level backup, but archive.today does not save its snapshots in WARC format. The reverse—from web.archive.org to archive.today—is also possible,See, for example, , an archive.today save of an Internet Archive snapshot of Spanish Wikipedia's home page. but the copy usually takes more time than a direct capture.
While saving a page, a list of URLs for individual page elements and their content sizes, HTTP statuses and MIME types is shown. This list can only be viewed during the crawling process. Removing advertisements, popups or expanding links from archived pages is possible by asking the owner to do it on his blog.
According to the site's FAQ, archive.today's storage layer runs on Apache Hadoop and Apache Accumulo, with all data stored on the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Textual content is replicated three times across servers in two data centers, both located in Europe, with at least one hosted by the French provider OVH; images are replicated twice. The site does not store snapshots in WARC format.
The scraping component has used a modified version of the Chromium browser since November 2019, replacing the previous PhantomJS-based engine.
Search The research toolbar enables advanced keywords operators, using as the wildcard character. Paired quotation marks address the search to an exact sequence of keywords present in the title or in the body of the webpage, whereas the insite operator restricts it to a specific Internet domain.For example, the string insite: https://en.wikipedia.org "World Cup" returns the https://archive.today/search/?q=insite%3A+http%3Aen.wikipedia.org+ "World+Cup"/ related snapshots While saving a dynamic list, archive.today search box shows only a result that links the previous and the following section of the list (e.g. 20 links for page).Example of dynamic list: The other web pages saved are filtered, and sometimes may be found by one of their occurrences. The search feature is backed by Google CustomSearch. If it delivers no results, archive.today attempts to utilize Yandex Search.
Bypassing paywalls
archive.today is frequently used to bypass paywalls on news websites, similarly to the defunct service 12ft.
Legal and ethical debate
The practice of sharing archive.today links to circumvent paywalls has sparked legal and ethical debate in Europe. In the Netherlands, journalist Peter Aanzee publicly challenged a physician who shared an archive.ph link to one of his paywalled articles in De Volkskrant, arguing that distributing archived copies constituted copyright infringement. The discussion drew on European Court of Justice jurisprudence on hyperlinking, particularly the 2016 GS Media v Sanoma ruling, which established that linking to illegally published content can constitute a copyright violation if the linker knew or ought to have known of the illegality—a presumption that applies automatically to parties acting for profit.
The largest Dutch publisher, DPG Media, acknowledged that archive.today is "a thorn in the side of many publishers (and journalists)" but noted that enforcement is difficult because the site is operated anonymously, hosted across multiple servers that frequently change location, and resurfaces under new domains when one is taken down.