See a domain’s history in the Wayback Machine

How to use the tool

Enter a domain name, with or without “https://”, and click “Look up”. The tool asks the Internet Archive for the captures of the domain’s home page, with or without “www” and over http or https. For a specific page, enter its full address: only the captures of that address are then listed.

The result gives the first and last capture, the days archived year by year with a link to the first capture of each year, the HTTP status codes met and, when it exceeds a year, the longest pause between two captures. A click on a link opens the capture in the Wayback Machine.

Where the data comes from

The tool queries the Internet Archive’s CDX API. This API serves the index the Wayback Machine uses to look up captures.¹ The query covers the exact address, with the date and HTTP status code of each capture, grouped by day with the collapse parameter, which the documentation describes as a way to filter out captures that are too dense.¹

One single request goes to the Internet Archive for each lookup, and the result is kept for six hours so the same lookup does not hit it twice. The addresses you enter are never contacted by the tool: only web.archive.org is.

What each block shows

The days archived per year form a timeline: a full year means the archive crawler came by often, a thin year that it came rarely or never. A day counts once, even if it holds several captures: the API does not give their exact number.

The HTTP status codes are those of the first capture of each day. A 200 is a page served, a 301 or 302 a redirect, a 404 a missing page, a 5xx a server failure. The code “-” appears for captures of the revisit type, which the archive records when the content is identical to an earlier capture.¹

The longest pause is the largest gap between two consecutive archived days. Beyond a year, the tool flags it: the threshold is a setting of the tool, no source sets a duration. A pause can come from a site that was offline, a domain name that expired or a crawler that rarely came by, and nothing in the archive settles which.

Judging a second-hand domain before buying it

Before buying, open the captures of several years and look at what the domain hosted: a site on the same topic as your project, another trade, casino or medicine content, a parking page. The tool’s links lead to the first capture of each year and to those that frame the longest pause.

Google treats separately the purchase of an expired domain name to reuse it primarily to manipulate search rankings, by hosting content that provides little to no value to users. Its examples: affiliate content on a site that used to belong to a government agency, commercial medical products on a former medical charity’s site, casino content on a former elementary school’s site.³

Complement the check with the domain age and dates to learn when it was created, renewed or expired, with the subdomain finder to see what existed beside the home page, and with the redirect checker to test what the name sends today.

What the archive does not say

The Wayback Machine does not archive everything. A site can be missing because the crawlers did not know it existed when they ran, because it was password protected, blocked by a robots.txt or otherwise inaccessible, or because its owner asked for its removal.² A missing capture therefore proves nothing about a domain’s past, and captures do not say who owned it.

The dates are those of the crawler’s visit, not of the moment content went live. The archived HTTP status is the one the crawler received at that moment.

The tool’s limits

The tool only looks at the requested address: the domain’s home page, or the page you enter. It does not list every archived page of a domain or their capture counts. The CDX API can search a whole domain, but in our tests of October 18, 2026 these searches took from 14 to over 60 seconds, even for small sites, and ended with 504 errors or a “Temporarily Offline” page.

Per lookup, the tool reads at most 20,000 days of captures, which is over fifty years of daily archiving. Each lookup counts as one request against a quota of 20 per 10-minute window per visitor, shared with the site’s other tools. When the Internet Archive does not answer, the tool says so: it makes up no result.

After the lookup

If the history is clean, the present is left to check. The CMS and host detector shows what runs behind the name today, and the robots.txt generator helps write the crawl rules of a site you take over. For a domain takeover or a redesign, the redirect plan matters as much as the history.

Frequently asked questions