One trillion saved pages. Over 99 petabytes of data. Hundreds of crawls running simultaneously every day. Behind these numbers lies a question that everyone who professionally works with web archives asks themselves: how exactly does the Wayback Machine decide which sites to scan, how often to return to them, and why are some domains represented in the archive with thousands of snapshots while others have only a few records over ten years?
Understanding these mechanisms is critically important for anyone involved in website restoration. If you know how the system works from the inside, you can predict what you'll find in the archive and what won't be there. And you can influence the archiving of your own sites while they're still live.

Buying an expired domain with history is one of the most effective ways to launch a new project with an already existing backlink profile, trust, and even traffic. Instead of promoting a bare domain from scratch, you get a platform that search engines already know and to some extent trust.

When it comes to restoring websites from archives, almost everyone thinks only of the Wayback Machine. That's understandable: archive.org is well known, it has a convenient interface, a trillion saved pages. But the Wayback Machine is not the only major web archive in the world. There is a project that is comparable in the volume of collected data to the Internet Archive, and in some respects even surpasses it. This project is called Common Crawl, and surprisingly few people know about it, even among those who work professionally with web archives.

We've released a browser extension called Archivarix Cache Viewer. It's available for Chrome, Edge and Firefox. The extension is free and contains no ads whatsoever.
The idea is simple: quick access to cached and archived versions of any web page right from the browser's context menu. No more manually copying URLs, opening Wayback Machine and pasting the address there. Right-click, pick the archive you need, done.

When you restore a website from the Web Archive, you expect to get original content that was once written by real people. But if the site's archives were made after 2023, there's a real chance of encountering texts generated by language models. Website owners were mass-replacing original content with texts from ChatGPT and similar tools, often without even trying to edit them.