The Wayback Machine Has a Free API — Check How Any Website Looked 10 Years Ago

A client once asked me to prove that a competitor copied their landing page design. I needed to show what both sites looked like 2 years ago. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has a free API that lets you retrieve any website's snapshot history — programmatically. The API Base URL: https://archive.org/wayback/available No API key. No auth. No rate limit docs (but be reasonable). 1. Check If a URL Has Been Archived import requests def check_archive ( url ): resp = requests . get ( ' https://archive.org/wayback/available ' , params = { ' url ' : url } ). json () snapshot = resp . get ( ' archived_snapshots ' , {}). get ( ' closest ' , {}) if snapshot : return { ' available ' : True , ' url ' : snapshot [ ' url ' ], ' timestamp ' : snapshot [ ' timestamp ' ], ' status ' : snapshot [ ' status ' ] } return { ' available ' : False } # Check any website result = check_archive ( ' github.com ' ) print ( result ) # {'available': True, 'url': 'http://web.archive.org/web/20260324.../github.c